HRESULT: 0x80131040: The located assembly's manifest definition does not match the assembly reference

Question

The located assembly\'s manifest definition does not match the assembly reference

getting this when running nunit through ncover. Any idea?

Answer 1

Just another case here. I had this error from Managed Debugging Assistant on the first time deserializing a XML file into objects under VS2010/.NET 4. A DLL containing classes for the objects is generated in a post-build event (usual Microsoft style stuff). Worked very well for several projects in same solution, problem appeared when doing that in one more of the projects. Error text:

BindingFailure was detected Message: The assembly with display name MyProjectName.XmlSerializers' failed to load in the 'LoadFrom' binding context of the AppDomain with ID 1. The cause of the failure was: System.IO.FileLoadException: Could not load file or assembly MyProjectName.XmlSerializers, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null' or one of its dependencies. The located assembly's manifest definition does not match the assembly reference. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80131040)

Since some answers here suggested a platform mismatch, I noticed that 3 projects and the solution had "mixed platforms" configuration selected, and 3 projects were compiled for x86 instead of AnyCPU. I have no platform-specific code (though some vendor-provided DLLs rely on a few x86 libraries). I replaced all occurrences of x86 into AnyCPU with this:

for a in $( egrep '(x86|AnyCPU)' */*.csproj *.sln -l  ) ; do echo $a ; sed -i 's/x86/AnyCPU/' $a ; done

Then the project would build but all options to run or debug code would be greyed out. Restarting VS would not help.

I reverted with git the references to the x86-library, just in case, but kept AnyCPU for all the code I compile.

Following F5 or Start Debugging Button is Greyed Out for Winform application? I unloaded and reloaded the starting project (it was also the one where the initial problem appeared in the first place).

After that, everything fell back into place: the program works without the initial error.

See http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/R/rain-dance.html , http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/V/voodoo-programming.html or http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/I/incantation.html and links there.