Lately, I’ve been making significant use of the ExecuteDDL task from the MSBuild Community Tasks project in one of my MSBuild scripts at work. Today, someone on the development team got the following error when they ran the script:
“Could not load file or assembly ‘Microsoft.SqlServer.ConnectionInfo, Version=9.0.242.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=89845dcd8080cc91’
It turned out that the ExecuteDDL task has a dependency on a specific version of Microsoft.SqlServer.ConnectionInfo deployed by the installation of SQL Server 2005 Management Tools. Without those tools on your machine, and without an automatic redirect in .NET to the latest version of the assembly, the error above results. The fix for it is to add the following XML to the “assemblyBinding” tag in MSBuild.exe.config (in whichever .NET Framework version you’re using):
<dependentAssembly>
<assemblyIdentity name=”Microsoft.SqlServer.ConnectionInfo” publicKeyToken=”89845dcd8080cc91″ culture=”neutral” />
<bindingRedirect oldVersion=”0.0.0.0-9.9.9.9″ newVersion=”10.0.0.0″ />
</dependentAssembly>
Thanks to Justin Burtch for finding and fixing this bug. I hope the MSBuild task gets updated to handle this somehow.