by Oliver
6. September 2011 22:18
Recently, we encountered a quite surprising behavior of MSBuild – the continuous integration build of our new collaborative Todo Management app (we hope to go into beta soon!) would produce a broken version whereas the local build with VS2010 was all smooth and well. Our admin and tester already posted about this problem over at his blog: MSBuild does not build like Visual Studio 2010.
The exception message finally led me down the right path:
Server Error in '/' Application.
No constructors on type 'Teamaton.TodoCore.Repositories.TodoRepositoryJson' can be found with 'Public binding flags'.
Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.
Exception Details: Autofac.Core.DependencyResolutionException: No constructors on type 'Teamaton.TodoCore.Repositories.TodoRepositoryJson' can be found with 'Public binding flags'.
The TodoRepositoryJson is a type we used at the very beginning of our development to quickly get started using a JSON document as data store. Later we switched to SQLite, so now we have another implementation: TodoRepositoryDb. Both implement the same interface ITodoRepository.
Turns out, the Autofac type registering code was the culprit:
1: var builder = new ContainerBuilder();
2: builder.RegisterAssemblyTypes(typeof (Todo).Assembly)
3: .Where(t => t.Name.Contains("Repository"))
4: .AsImplementedInterfaces()
5: .InstancePerLifetimeScope();
What worked with Visual Studio, didn’t work with MSBuild: obviously – well, now it is – both ITodoRepository implementations were registered with Autofac, and while Autofac’s assembly scanning delivered them in the order we assumed from the DLL built with VS – first, TodoRepositoryJson, and second, TodoRepositoryDb, thus overriding the first registration – MSBuild seems to build a DLL which returns the inverse order! Very strange.
Honestly, I’m not familiar with the anatomy of DLLs and surprised by this result. But it’s the only explanation I’ve found so far.
Well, the solution to the problem is, of course, to care more about what we register with Autofac and in which order.
Happy coding,
Oliver