PPUtil: A Utility for Publisher Policy Generation

The conventional method of creating publisher policy (PP) assemblies becomes cumbersome when dealing with many assemblies, and many earlier versions of assemblies¹.

PPUtil is a configuration-based utility for generating PP for many assemblies/versions. This tool was authored using .NET 2.0, however, the resultant PP assemblies can be used with .NET 1.0/1.1-compiled assemblies.

Download

• Binaries: PPUtil_Binaries_v1_0_0_0.zip
  
• Source: PPUtil_Source_v1_0_0_0.zip

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Usage

PPUtil configurationFile outputDirectory

Common Usage Scenarios 

• Redirect a specific earlier version of an assembly to a later version;
• Redirect a range of earlier versions of an assembly to a later version.

In both scenarios, resolution of the redirection for the earlier assembly versions is limited to major/minor version combinations i.e. build and revision numbers are not considered. This is due to the design of the publisher policy mechanism itself. 

Configuration Examples

Redirect a specific earlier version of an assembly to a later version

Use the oldVersion attribute of the bindingRedirect element to specify the specific earlier version to redirect from. The major/minor component of the oldVersion will typically correspond to the oldMajorMinorVersion attribute of the publisherPolicy element.

  <publisherPolicy>
    <assemblies>
      <assembly name="SampleAssembly"
                publicKeyToken="baa3201a127d8068"
                strongNameKeyPath="SampleKey.snk" >
        <publisherPolicies>
          <publisherPolicy oldMajorMinorVersion="1.0" version="1.0.0.0">
            <bindingRedirect oldVersion="1.0.0.0" newVersion="1.1.0.0" />
          </publisherPolicy>
        </publisherPolicies>
      </assembly>
    </assemblies> 
  </publisherPolicy>

Redirect a range of earlier versions of an assembly to a later version

Use the oldLowestVersion and oldHighestVersion attributes of the bindingRedirect element to specify the range of earlier versions to redirect from.

  <publisherPolicy>
    <assemblies>
      <assembly name="SampleAssembly"
                publicKeyToken="baa3201a127d8068"
                strongNameKeyPath="SampleKey.snk" >
        <publisherPolicies>
          <publisherPolicy oldMajorMinorVersion="2.0" version="2.0.0.0">
            <bindingRedirect oldLowestVersion="2.0.0.0"
                             oldHighestVersion="2.1.0.9"
                             newVersion="2.2.0.0" />
          </publisherPolicy>
        </publisherPolicies>
      </assembly>
    </assemblies>
  </publisherPolicy>

Tips

• The provided configuration file must include a configuration section declaration for the publisherPolicy configuration section, as follows. The utility will also detect the absence of this declaration and prompt the user accordingly.

<configuration>
  <configSections>
    <section name="publisherPolicy" type="PublisherPolicyTool.Configuration.PublisherPolicyConfigurationSection, PPUtil" />
  </configSections>
  ...
</configuration>

• The PP assembly itself is versioned. When there are multiple versions of a PP assembly available, the version with the highest number is used. In .NET 1.0/1.1 a bug exists in the assembly loader whereby when determining the PP assembly with the highest number, the version numbers are sorted in alphabetic order, rather than numeric order.
• The same strong name key used to sign the assembly the PP applies to must be used to sign the PP assembly;
• When GACing a PP assembly, the generated PP configuration file must reside in the same folder as the PP assembly;
• To diagnose binding issues, the binding resolution can be traced using fuslogw or output to disk by modifying registry values;

Acknowledgments

The idea of using the managed assembly builder APIs for PP generation was derived from Omers publisher policy generation sample.

Footnotes

1: Generating PP involves specifying the old version (major and minor version number resolution) of an assembly that the binding policy within the PP assembly will be applied to. The old version corresponds to an earlier version of an assembly that is referenced by dependent assemblies.

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