MSBuild

New version of Microsoft.IdentityModel.Clients.ActiveDirectory (ADAL.NET) is out – good time to update!

Mock Function call to force loading an assembly - how elegant!

There’s now a new version of the assembly Microsoft.IdentityModel.Clients.ActiveDirectory available – plenty of reasons to update right away! Let me offer you one hot take on the matter since the earlier 3.x -versions of the package had some issues.

Why bother updating?

In an earlier post I described an issue I had with Microsoft.IdentityModel.Clients.ActiveDirectory.Platform not getting copied during the build in a referencing project. In 3.17.0, which the developers published this month, they fixed the issue! The new package actually contains separate DLLs for different platforms.

In essence this means, that from C#/.NET -developer’s standing point, the team has assimilated the Microsoft.IdentityModel.Clients.ActiveDirectory.Platform assembly, among other platform DLLs, into Microsoft.IdentityModel.Clients.ActiveDirectory package itself. Hence, you’ll need no more funky hacks to ensure, that Visual Studio will end up copying the DLLs during the build! 🙂

What’s new with Microsoft.IdentityModel.Clients.ActiveDirectory 3.17?

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A quick (and handy!) hack to force referenced assembly to getting copied to a project

Mock Function call to force loading an assembly - how elegant!

Visual Studio failing to copy a referenced assembly to a project in build might lead to surprising runtime errors. This post will explain one method of fixing these issues, using Microsoft.IdentityModel.Clients.ActiveDirectory as the example – as earlier versions of that assembly had this issue!

Problem

After build, you might get this kind of error:

Could not load file or assembly 'Microsoft.IdentityModel.Clients.ActiveDirectory.Platform, Version=3.13.1.846, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified. 

System.IO.FileNotFoundException at System.Reflection.RuntimeAssembly._nLoad(AssemblyName fileName, String codeBase, Evidence assemblySecurity, RuntimeAssembly locationHint, StackCrawlMark& stackMark, IntPtr pPrivHostBinder, Boolean throwOnFileNotFound, Boolean forIntrospection, Boolean suppressSecurityChecks) at System.Reflection.RuntimeAssembly.nLoad(AssemblyName fileName, String codeBase, Evidence assemblySecurity, RuntimeAssembly locationHint, StackCrawlMark& stackMark, IntPtr pPrivHostBinder, Boolean throwOnFileNotFound, Boolean forIntrospection, Boolean suppressSecurityChecks) at System.Reflection.RuntimeAssembly.InternalLoadAssemblyName(AssemblyName assemblyRef, Evidence assemblySecurity, RuntimeAssembly reqAssembly, StackCrawlMark& stackMark, IntPtr pPrivHostBinder, Boolean throwOnFileNotFound, Boolean forIntrospection, Boolean suppressSecurityChecks) at System.Reflection.Assembly.Load(AssemblyName assemblyRef) at Microsoft.IdentityModel.Clients.ActiveDirectory.PlatformPlugin.LoadPlatformSpecificAssembly()

In my case, I had referenced both of these DLLs in my “class library project”, which provided my console program a lot of functionality:

  • Microsoft.IdentityModel.Clients.ActiveDirectory.Platform
  • Microsoft.IdentityModel.Clients.ActiveDirectory

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The specified path, file name, or both are too long. The fully qualified file name must be less than 260 characters, and the directory name must be less than 248 characters.

Too long deployment path

This post describes a few different ways of fixing the error “The specified path, file name, or both are too long. The fully qualified file name must be less than 260 characters, and the directory name must be less than 248 characters.” one can get when trying to package/publish a SharePoint solution, web site or Azure Webjob.

UPDATE 11.4.2016: I actually got this nasty exception on another occasion (Azure webjob publish), so I updated the text accordingly.

Symptoms

Visual Studio throws the following error when packaging a SharePoint solution to a .wsp file, OR when deploying or publishing your web project (for example Azure Webjob).

The specified path, file name, or both are too long. The fully qualified file name must be less than 260 characters, and the directory name must be less than 248 characters.

 

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