Saturday, April 18, 2009

Finding out the .NET Framework version that an assembly uses

There will be cases where you would need to find out the .NET Framework version of an application or assembly running on a machine and you just don't have the right tools. This is especially true when you need to promote your code from test to production environment. If there is only one version of the .NET Framework on the machine, it would be easy. But if you have servers with multiple versions of the .NET Framework installed and the assembly is not configured to bind to the correct framework version, you might end up having an application that might break due to incompatibility issues. This is true for .NET Framework versions 2.0 and below although I haven't really tried out the newer ones but it would be basically the same since .NET Framework 3.0 and 3.5 are just stacks on top of 2.0

If you don't have the tools on the server to check, you can simply copy the assembly on your local machine and use either ILDASM.exe or simply download RedGate's Reflector. Reflector does not need installation as long as you have the appropriate .NET Framework versions in your machine. Just extract the EXE and CONFIG files and you're good to go. A video demonstrating how to use RedGate's Reflector can be found here

Transfering Windows Scheduled Task Jobs between servers

There might be some cases where you need to transfer Windows Scheduled Task jobs like maybe promoting them from test to production. The simplest way to do it is by simply opening the Windows Scheduled Task in Windows Explorer for the source and the destination servers (you can do this by expanding on My Network Places and selecting the destination server. Just remember to open separate window for the two of them). Copying and pasting between windows should do the trick. It would be a bit challenging if the source and target servers are not in the domain as you would need an account that has the appropriate privileges on both machines
Google