Loading an assembly targeted for .NET 4.5 on a .NET 4.0 app domain

c# .net .net-4.0 .net-4.5 assembly-loading
Madushan picture Madushan · Sep 28, 2012 · Viewed 8.9k times · Source

Assuming the system has .NET 4.0 and .NET 4.5 installed.

Is it possible to load and work with a .NET 4.5 assembly from an assembly written targeting .NET 4.0?

Simply put, can I call Assembly.Load from .NET 4.0 code to load a .NET 4.5 targeting assembly?

Answer

MerickOWA picture MerickOWA · Sep 28, 2012

Assuming a system as .NET 4.0 and .NET 4.5:

As stated in marcgravell's blog linked by sehe

4.5 is an in-place over-the-top install on top of 4.0, in the GAC; once you have installed 4.5, 4.0 runs with the 4.5 assemblies

Then calling Assembly.Load from a .NET code targeting 4.0 (compiled by a 4.0 compiler), will actually run in using the 4.5 framework implementation, so I don't see any reason why it couldn't load a 4.5 assembly.

margravell notes that problems occur when you try to run .NET 4.5 compiled code on a system with only 4.0 installed, as the implementation of the yield return/break iterators causes a missing method reference. But this shouldn't affect you.

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