I developed an application that has various plugins, using the MEF framework to lazily load any implementation of the plug-in interfaces in the application directory - pretty standard stuff.
However, since then I have developed a plugin that relies on some DLL files from another application (which installs them in the GAC) - on a computer with installed applications, the application works fine, but on a computer that doesn’t have all of my application crashes.
I did some research on when the runtime looks for DLLs and apparently does this for every method it encounters. Then I tried to modify the plugin to determine if the necessary DLLs are inside the GAC before moving on to the method that requires them, but this led to the same crash.
Then I commented on all the code in the class, except for the bare constructor and some stubs for the interface, to see if this would work, but it caused the same error. Does the .net environment attempt to download the GAC assemblies immediately?
Does anyone have experience in such a situation? What are my options?
thank
Marlon
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