What are the limitations of the .NET Assembly format?
- by McKAMEY
We just ran into an interesting issue that I've not experienced before. We have a large scale production ASP.NET 3.5 SP1 Web App Project in Visual Studio 2008 SP1 which gets compiled and deployed using a Website Deployment Project. Everything has worked fine for the last year, until after a check-in yesterday the app started critically failing with BadImageFormatException.
The check-in in question doesn't change anything particularly special and the errors are coming from areas of the app not even changed. Using Reflector we inspected the offending methods to find that there were garbage strings in the code (which Reflector humorously interpreted as Chinese characters). We have consistently reproduced this on several machines so it does not appear to be hardware related.
Further inspection showed that those garbage strings did not exist in the Assemblies used as inputs to aspnet_merge.exe during deployment.
Web Deployment Project Output
Assemblies Properties:
Merge all outputs to a single assembly
Merge each individual folder output to its own assembly
Merge all pages and control outputs to a single assembly
Create a separate assembly for each page and control output
In the web deployment project properties if we set the merge options to the first option ("Merge all outputs to a single assembly") we experience the issue, yet all of the other options work perfectly!
So my question: does anyone know why this is happening? Is there a size-limit to aspnet_merge.exe's capabilities (the resulting merged DLL is around 19.3 MB)? Are there any other known issues with merging the output of WAPs?
I would love it if any Assembly format / aspnet_merge gurus know about any such limitations like this. Seems to me like a 25MB Assembly, while big, isn't outrageous. Less disk to hit if it is all pregen'd stuff.
