Accessing assemblies at design time in Blend 4

Question

I am getting an exception from my code while designing in Blend 4.

I have narrowed the issue down to loading a specific library. Other libraries can be loaded fine, just this one fails. So, for this code:

var a = Assembly.Load("lib1");
var b = Assembly.Load("lib2");

Line two will throw an exception: Could not load file or assembly 'lib2' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.

If the same code is run outside of Blend, it does not throw. Both assemblies appear to be referenced the same way in the project, and both are marked Copy Local.

Any suggestions on how to troubleshoot this issue?

Answer 1

At design time Blend copies your assemblies to a temporary folder other than your output folder so things can behave differently than when you run the program normally. Blend also requires the "Any CPU" configuration for design time so if you run "x86" normally you can get different results simply because of that.

But Blend itself is a managed program like any other and to diagnose the problem in detail you can crack open the Fusion Log Viewer to see assembly binding errors to try to find out what is going wrong. Presumably the library itself is where it ought to be (in Blend's temporary folder) but one of its indirect dependencies is not being found. By using the log viewer with sufficient detail, you should be able to see the specific binding failure that is causing the problem.

Here is a link:

• Fuslogvw.exe (Assembly Binding Log Viewer)