Monday 23 November 2015

What is DLL HELL in .NET

Let us try and understand DLL HELL problem with an example.
1. I have 2 applications, A1 and A2 installed on my computer. 

2. Both of these applications use shared assembly shared.dll

3. Now, I have a latest version of Application - A2 available on the internet.

4. I download the latest version of A2 and install it on my machine.

5. This new installation has over written Shared.dll, which is also used by Application - A1.

6. Application - A2 works fine, but A1 fails to work, because the newly installed Shared.dll is not backward compatible.

So, DLL HELL is a problem where one application will install a new version of the shared component that is not backward compatible with the version already on the machine, causing all the other existing applications that rely on the shared component to break. With .NET versioning we don’t have DLL HELL problem anymore.


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