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Asked: 2012-08-07 07:11:09 +0800 CST

IIS reports a System.Runtime.Serialization.SerializationException when trying to load a dll

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I've been fighting with IIS the last few days and the error that IIS generates is:

Exception: System.Runtime.Serialization.SerializationException

Message: Unable to find assembly 'FluentNHibernate, Version=1.0.0.633, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=8aa435e3cb308880'.

What's strange is that if I check in procmon, I can watch the IIS process find the dll in the directory where I would expect it to find it, and then it continues to search other directories for the exact same dll. It is also searching for the PDB for some reason for the DLL. The DLL also exists in the temp directory that IIS creates:

C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\Temporary ASP.NET Files\ws-sm\bc2df7a7\729516d\assembly\dl3\42ab9d3b\00d491a3_3e6bcd01\FluentNHibernate.DLL

So it was clearly able to copy the dll to it's running location, but it reports it can't find it.

I checked all of my web.config files and compilation debug is set to false in all cases so I'm surprised to see it looking for pdbs.

Googling this error didn't return anything useful.

I'm using Win2k8 x86 with IIS 7 and my application pool is ASP.NET v4.0 Integrated.

iis

2 Answers

  1. This is a typical .NET troubleshooting issue.

    A couple of things:

    1. The SerializationException you see is a higher level error. It is not the root cause.
    2. The Message where it was unable to find the assembly means a couple of things:
      1. You either do not have the required file in the bin directory of the application.
      2. The file in the bin directory is not the right version. (most likely)
    3. The temp file path has nothing to do with it, this is just that a temp place and the file may already have been copied over from before.
    4. The PDB or debug database is looked for to help extract symbols and other debug information to provide you with a more detailed error, either way it is not required and seldom deployed with compiled production DLLs.

    I would definately make sure that the version of the Fluent NHibernate DLL matches what the software expects to run. You may have to contact the developer/vendor to clarify the issue though. Most likely this is not an IIS problem as much as it is an application problem.

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  2. I finally figured it out and it wasn't related to IIS. Posting my answer in case someone else comes along in the future with a similar problem.

    What ended up being my issue was that I was unable to connect to one of my databases, and this caused an exception to be thrown. Somehow (still not sure how) this was caught by one thing, and then caught by IIS which tried to serialize an error message, but it couldn't find a DLL it needed since where it ended up catching it was in another AppDomain. I ended up finding this problem by attaching windbg to the w3wp process and watching it start up.

    So if you get this error try attaching windbg to your process and see what errors are being thrown.

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