Difference in DLL when compiling on Build Server instead of Dev Machine.

Question

I have an application that loads user controls into .NET web application. When I compile and test the application locally on my dev machine it works on my machine. The project builds successfully using MSBuild on our build server. However when I deploy the dll generated by MSBuild on the build server I get the following error when the application loads the control:

BC30456: 'CreateResourceBasedLiteralControl' is not a member of 'ASP.usercontrols_somecontrol_ascx'.

I took a look and compared the dll generated on my machine and compared it(looked at the file size) with the one created by the build server and noticed a difference in the file size. This is confusing considering the code being built locally and on the build server is IDENTICAL. I manually compared each file by hand. So my question is: What is causing this error? What would be different between MSBuild's compilation of the code and what is going on in Visual Studio when compiling the code?

Answer 1

You've got a versioning issue. Some assemblies are different on your target machine than on your dev machine. I'm afraid you're going to have to do some digging to hunt it down, since this error message is entirely unhelpful. Really it's pointing you in the wrong direction since the problem isn't in your assembly. It's probably caused by something in your project References. Have you got some 3rd party tool or SDK on your dev machine that hasn't been updated on the server yet?

The last time I saw this was when I had built a DotNetNuke module that was built against a newer DotNetNuke.dll assembly than my server had.