Versioning of libraries and designer

• .NET Core Version: 5.0.x

• Have you experienced this same bug with .NET Framework?: No

Problem description:

We are running Visual Studio 16.9.0 Preview 3.0 which ships with some .NET 5.0.2 bits. These bits are consumed by the WinForms designer. The designer then serializes these types into .resx along with the version of the library, eg.:

  <assembly alias="System.Windows.Forms.Primitives" name="System.Windows.Forms.Primitives, Version=5.0.2.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089" />
  <data name="label_Title.Margin" type="System.Windows.Forms.Padding, System.Windows.Forms.Primitives">
    <value>0, 3, 3, 3</value>
  </data>

The application itself is however compiled with a fixed version of .NET framework specified in global.json file:

{
  "sdk": {
    "version": "5.0.100",
    "allowPrerelease": true,
    "rollForward": "latestFeature"
  }
}

This results in issue where the serialized types cannot be loaded at runtime and crash the app.

Expected behavior:

Assembly versions (as opposed to file versions!) should not change between service releases, or designer should target the same service release the application is compiled with.

[filipnavara]

Can you give an example to this and open a new issue with more details?

@dreddy-work I’ll file a separate report for that through VS feedback. Basically any null that is assigned into control property in the designer ends up as ResXNullRef type in the .resx file. Since the designer ships its own copy of ResX classes it happens to use its own copy of ResXNullRef that resides in the designer assembly. It puts the wrong assembly name into the .resx file and fails at runtime.

[dreddy-work]

Can you give an example to this and open a new issue with more details?

@dreddy-work I’ll file a separate report for that through VS feedback. Basically any null that is assigned into control property in the designer ends up as ResXNullRef type in the .resx file. Since the designer ships its own copy of ResX classes it happens to use its own copy of ResXNullRef that resides in the designer assembly. It puts the wrong assembly name into the .resx file and fails at runtime.

We stopped writing designer specific type info into Resx file during serialization. We still yet to do work for the resources added directly from the Resource editor in VisualStudio but not by Winforms designer. If you still see this issue with latest VS (VS 2019 16.10 preview3) and If you have already opened a feedback ticket, can you please share link here ?