EF Core fails to load hostpolicy.dll when RuntimeIdentifier is win-x86

This post was most recently updated on July 31st, 2022.

I ran into another interesting one when working with a .NET Core 3.0 project and Entity Framework Core – this time, RuntimeIdentifier configuration causing trouble. In short, running Update-Database (to apply code-first migrations to your local database) locally would return this, annoying error:

Failed to load the dll from [runtimepath]\win-x86\hostpolicy.dll], HRESULT: 0x800700C1
An error occurred while loading required library hostpolicy.dll from [runtimepath]\win-x86\]

I suspect this can happen with any x86 runtimeIdentifier, but the one I had specified in my .csproj-file was this:

win-x86

This value (or similar) is required for a self-contained ASP.NET Core deployment. And I’m sure there are a few other reasons why you might need it in the file.

And obviously, you could be running into this when you’re running Update-Database for Entity Framework Core in PowerShell or something.

Description

My investigation led me to this issue on GitHub, which proposes a solution – but alas, the solution they had (changing the RuntimeIdentifier as follows) didn’t work for me.

<RuntimeIdentifiers>win10-x64;win7-x86</RuntimeIdentifiers>

While it sounds like it worked for some users, it really didn’t for me. Instead I got a new error:

The "HasTrailingSlash" function only accepts a scalar value, but its argument "$(PublishDir)" evaluates to "bin\Debug\netcoreapp3.0\win10-x64;win7-32x\publish\" which is not a scalar value. C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Enterprise\MSBuild\15.0\Bin\Microsoft.Common.CurrentVersion.targets

This, as seen below in a screenshot, was especially funny because I was definitely not using Visual Studio 2017 – but instead, Visual Studio 2019, which is required to get Blazor development going at all!

The error above blocked me from building anything in Visual Studio.

Also, since I’m packaging the solution as a self-contained application, I would probably run into this as well: https://github.com/dotnet/cli/issues/10474

So overall, I had to find a runtime identifier that would let me use the Entity Framework Core code-first migrations.

Solutions

And there we go! Did it work for you or not? Let me know in the comments section below!

References

There are a bunch of related issues on GitHub. If you want to read about the background, check these out:

• https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/3382
• https://github.com/dotnet/cli/issues/10474
• https://github.com/dotnet/core-setup/issues/4865

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Antti K. Koskela

Developer / Speaker / Consultant at Koskila / Precio Fishbone / Norppandalotti Software Co / Alter - Experience Ideas Ltd

Antti Koskela is a proud digital native nomadic millennial full stack developer (is that enough funny buzzwords? That's definitely enough funny buzzwords!), who works as Solutions Architect for Precio Fishbone, building delightful Digital Workplaces.

He's been a developer from 2004 (starting with PHP and Java), and he's been working on .NET projects, Azure, Office 365, SharePoint and a lot of other stuff. He's also Microsoft MVP for Azure.

This is his personal professional (e.g. professional, but definitely personal) blog.

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