How many time did you had problems with your references of a project in .NET? Not very often but when this occurs you can spend a lot of hours trying to find what is the problem. Invalid version of assembly, incorrect path to your assembly can cause these problems.
Errors like the following can have the same source:
- Could not load file or assembly 'xxx, Version=yyyy, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=zzz' or one of its dependencies. The located assembly's manifest definition does not match the assembly reference. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80131040)
- This assembly is protected by an unregistered version …
In these cases a great tool can be used to see the loading stack of each assembly. The name of the tool is Assembly Binding Log Viewer (Fuslogvw.exe). It is preinstalled if you have Visual Studio already installed.
This tool will log all the assembly bindings from all the processes that are running on the given computer. Based on this information we can see the exact problem of the binding, the path from where the assembly is loading and much more.
You can start the program using “fuslogvw.exe” command from VS command prompt. Don’t forget to run it as an Administrator.
You should know that all the logs are written in Internet Explorer temporary file folder. Because of this if the temporary folder of the IE is corrupt that you may have problem running this application. In the case you don’t see any kind of information, that you should clear the temporary folder of IE.
Also, don’t forget to click on the “Refresh” button. The UI is not automatically updated when new logs are available.
In the end, for a developer this tool can be very useful and you should try it.