TITLE!

After hours and hours of searching between a coworker and I as to why an assembly version forwarding in this dll hell we’ve caused ourself wasn’t working in one project and it was in another, we explored every possibility we could think of:

1. Manually searching assemblies for manual loads
2. Searching the CLR for the location of runtime forwarding programatically (and failed)
3. Copying and pasting the exact same text from seperate configuration files known to be working in hopes of success
4. Sacrificing a kitten

All to no avail. After searching, and searching more I finaally ran across this awesome Microsoft Social post where someone mentioned that the configuration element having an xmlns would cause runtime to be ignored. Surely, this couldn’t be the case, but a quick test proved it to in fact be a solution.

So, to summarize:

Bad:

Good:

New one to me…

So, every once and a while I accidently hit the wrong setup type when opening a brand new copy of VS after my 483rd format, and F5 is no longer debug, F6 no longer rebuild, and I realize that I *should* have hit “Visual C# Developer”.

Alas, MSDN has a solution:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/f1z20s6z.aspx

Just keep in mind it will overwrite some other format settings if you have them set.