Month: March 2011

Determining the .NET target version of a dll or .exe assembly

It’s been a while since I blogged. It’s good to be back.

I switched job descriptions and became an application architect, which means, I get to decide how solutions are designed…and if the solutions won’t work, the blame goes on me :-p

Now seriously, I was reviewing old posts and realized WordPress didn’t make a good job at keeping my old code snippets from Blogger :(, the formatting is way off and you can hardly see the code properly. Oh well.

Today we had a deployment issue, one of our projects was compiled to the wrong target framework. When we compared properties and sizes we realized this was not the ordinary dll size, but how could we determine the actual target framework?

The windows explorer properties or the IIS properties are of no use in this case, giving you only the build number.

There are actually two main options with two utilities distributed on the SDK to determine the target framework of a dll or exe:

  1. ILDASM.exe
  2. CorFlags.exe
ILDASM.exe to determine framework version
ILDASM.exe to determine framework version

and if you want to use CorFlags.exe:

CorFlags.exe determining target framework version of a dll

Happy coding 🙂

L.