Why does Castle Windsor constructor crash on Windows Server 2003 with a manifest?

Question

As part of getting our application ready for Windows7, we recently added a manifest to our our user interface's exe.

It runs ok on Windows7. However, now when I try to run the signed exe on Windows Server 2003, the program crashes during startup. I've looked at the crash dump, and it seems to by failing in the constructor of Castle.Core.Resource.ConfigResource which is called from the Program.Main method.

If this is included in the manifest:

<compatibility xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:compatibility.v1">
    <application>
        <supportedOS Id="{e2011457-1546-43c5-a5fe-008deee3d3f0}"/>
        <supportedOS Id="{35138b9a-5d96-4fbd-8e2d-a2440225f93a}"/>
    </application>
</compatibility>

then it crashes, but if I comment it out and rebuild, it's ok.

Have you got any ideas about what could be causing the problem?

Answer 1

Well, I still don't know the reason why it doesn't work, but I have a workaround.

Instead of loading the castle configuration from the app.config file with something like:

IWindsorContainer container =
    new WindsorContainer(
        new XmlInterpreter(new ConfigResource("castle")));

Move the config into a literal string and load it this way:

StaticContentResource scr = new StaticContentResource(
    @"<configuration>
        <!-- Move stuff that was originally in the app.config to here -->
    </configuration>"
    );
IWindsorContainer container = new WindsorContainer(new XmlInterpreter(scr));

It seems the problem is down to ConfigResource's constructor running this line:

XmlNode section = (XmlNode) ConfigurationManager.GetSection(sectionName);

this returns null if I use mt.exe to add a manifest to the console, but returns the expected value if I don't.