c# app works on dev box, has dll conflicts when deployed (oh, no, not again)

Question

My app uses Nuget packages including Spring.rest and spring.social.twitter. Two library oddities crop up when deployed (deploying is pretty much just installing the .net45 framework and then everything in my release folder onto another machine via WIX).

First oddity is that Nuget has common.logging 2.1.2 installed on my dev box (used by spring.rest), but when spring.rest loads on the prod box, it's looking for 2.0.0. No idea why, as I don't even have 2.0.0 on my dev box, but I can download that version and copy it onto prod, and get past that one.

The second one is the spring.social - nuget decided to use the net20 libs (it's using the net40-client for spring.rest), which works fine on dev, but they (the spring.social libs) decide they need the net20 version of the spring.rest.dll on the prod box. If I change my csproj to use the net40 spring.social libs, I can't compile, because apparently they are not identical even in the same version (link failures on two function calls that work with the net20 dll). If I change spring.rest down to net20, again I can't compile, so that isn't an option.

They aren't strongly named (of course), and they are really the same version and same architecture, so I'm not sure that I could even put them in the GAC if I wanted to. I did try putting both versions in the GAC, but although I got no installer errors from my MSI, it also just did not put the libs with the same names in (I had put almost all of them there for giggles, and the rest worked). The app will run on a dedicated box, so I "own" everything about it and can do all kinds of evil things to it that would be verboten in a "normal" user app, but this little circle of fun has me baffled.

Trying to track down what is running on the dev box (to see if perhaps it is reaching out to some other location to find libs), I tried DepencyWalker (depends), but since everything is delay-loaded, it doesn't do much, even with profiling, since that stops when it hits the entry point. I tried fuslogvw, but common.logging and spring.rest don't even show up? The only nuget packages I see in fuslogvw are spring.social.twitter and newtonsoft.json, and they are both loaded from my bin folder as expected. As I'm out of ideas, I'm turning to the wonderful SO community. What are some good next steps?

Thanks, Greg

Answer 1

Most likely the .config file in production and on your development machine differs. If the dev .config file contains a bindingRedirect and your production .config does not this could be the cause for the observed behavior.

<configuration>
   <runtime>
      <assemblyBinding xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1">
       <dependentAssembly>
         <assemblyIdentity name="myAssembly"
                           publicKeyToken="32ab4ba45e0a69a1"
                           culture="en-us" />
         <bindingRedirect oldVersion="1.0.0.0"
                          newVersion="2.0.0.0"/>
       </dependentAssembly>
      </assemblyBinding>
   </runtime>
</configuration>

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/7wd6ex19(v=vs.71).aspx