Developer Solutions for Web and Other

In Visual Studio you may have noticed, and ignored, the pulldowns in your toolbar which usually contain "Release" "Any Cpu". The "Any CPU" part in particular is of interest especially if you plan on running your apps on Windows 64. These configurations are contained in each project and solution i.e. if you open the projects in a text editor you'll see sections in the XML which contain the settings. These settings are also accessible through the Visual Studio UI via the pulldowns mentioned earlier. The significance of the "Any CPU" is it's telling the compiler to compile the code into assemblies into code which can run on either 32 or 64 bit machines. If your assemblies are used by an application written in 64bit (and of course the app runs on a 64bit machine) then your assemblies will be used in the 64bit context, the same stands for 32bit (of course 32bit apps can also run on 32 or 43 bit machines). 64bit machines have an additional regi...

Like so many others I wanted to update the Version of all of my assemblies with one version value but I could not find the solution I wanted, hence I've written my own, see the source code below. This implementation fits my own problem, a build script which gets all our codebase sourcecode from SourceSafe, builds all the projects and then labels all the sourecode with a single label passed in by the builder at command-line. This implementation takes either 1 or 2 arguments. If only 1 is supplied it will do a check for a valid Version value i.e. the version must be of the format 1.0.0.0 and the third value must be less than 65535 (This is a .NET requirement, the assembly would not build if the number is above 65535, see here for more ). If 2 arguments are supplied it will do all that step 1 does and also will set the version to AssemblyVersion and AssemblyFileVersion in all AssemblyInfo.cs files under the directory specified (and it's subdirectories). e.g. here's how I cal...

In a previous post, dotNET - Under the Hood, IL Assembly , I briefly described how to write some IL Code to an Assembly, but what if at a later occasion you'll want to invoke these methods from the dll. This could be achieved by loading the assembly in an AppDomain and then invoking the methods within ???? Or you could use what are known as DynamicMethod s to invoke the methods. DynamicMethod is a class that also resides in the System.Reflection.Emit namespace. Why would you want to use DynamicMethod? it's useful when you want to load methods into memory or write methods in memory and invoke later. We can write IL code in memory in the exact same was as we wrote IL code earlier using the MethodBuilder. In my experience DynamicMethod is a bit tricky to get right especially when you try to invoke your Dynamic method. The problem I found was with the constructor parameters, what do they mean; There are 6 constructor overloads in all; half of these are associated with an class in...

IL (Intermediate Language) is also referred to as MSIL (Microsoft Intermediate Language) or even ILAsm which is the same thing. IL is the code which your source code (C#, VB.NET etc) is compiled into. When you EXE or DLL is run these IL code is converted to a machine language particular to the present machine i.e. if the current machine being used to run the application is a Windows 2000 machine the IL will be converted into Windows instructions before running on the x86 processor (processor architecture used for Windows machines). When you're developing with .NET languages with a Development tool such as Visual Studio 2005 the compiler you use will generate the correct/valid IL for you, but what if you want to create your own IL for some reason! One reason could be that you've developed your own Language and would like it to run on .NET, in this case you'll need to write out some sort of Assembly, be it EXE or DLL, with IL code. To do this you can use some Classes availa...