Dealing with Evolving Assemblies

9 Feb 2006 9:05 PM

Mark Olbert

I'm in the process of amassing a set of .NET support libraries that I use in many of my projects.

In a number of cases instances of Types from these libraries are created indirectly (e.g., my calling Invoke on a ConstructorInfo
object derived from the Type). Since I strong-name the assemblies this tends to cause a problem as the libraries evolve because the
assembly-qualified name of a Type changes whenever the version of the strong-named assembly changes.

Since this can hardly be a novel issue (but it's not one I've been successful googling, probaby because it's abstract), I'd love to
hear ideas for best practices. Or should I just stop strong-naming the assemblies?

- Mark

10 Feb 2006 2:35 AM

Peter Huang" [MSFT]

Hi Mark,

Yes, strongnamed assembly need to match the qualified name(e.g. the
version, name, culture... need to be same).
Commonly the strongnamed assembly is most used for share assembly and put
it into GAC. Commonly we will not update a strongnamed assembly very
frequently.

In case the version is changed, we can deploy another version of the strong
named assembly, that is to say two version of the same assembly can coexist.
We can use the <bindingRedirect> Element to tell the runtime to bind to
another version B when it want version A.
Redirecting Assembly Versions
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/7wd6ex19.aspx

Or you can maintain the assembly version unchangable.

Otherwise, I think you may try to use a private assembly(not strong named
assembly).

Best regards,

Peter Huang
Microsoft Online Partner Support

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