libcheck – quick and dirty assembly compatibility debugging

Today I wrote a little command-line tool for helping track down .NET assembly compatibility issues:

System.IO.FileLoadException: Could not load file or assembly {0} or one of its dependencies. The located assembly's manifest definition does not match the assembly reference.

My team encounters these problems very regularly — we have a build/dependency tree that easily rivals Castle Project in complexity, and it gets out of sync easily while waiting for downstream projects to build. Normally, your only option in this situation is to fire up reflector and poke through all your references manually — a very tedious process.

So, to use this tool, you point it at a directory (e.g. your lib folder) and provide a list of patterns for assemblies you want to check:

libcheck.exe C:devyourapplib *NCover*

Then it’ll tell you any that are broken.