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Asked: 2026-05-17T00:04:24+00:00

Along with: An attempt was made to load a program with an incorrect format

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Along with: An attempt was made to load a program with an incorrect format

I have A.EXE that references B.DLL. Both are mine. Both are set to x86 for the platform target. B.DLL references:

System
System.Data
System.Windows.Forms
System.XML

I am using VS2010 on Win7 64-bit. All search results I can find say that this is because of loading 32-bit assemblies into 64-bit executables or vice versa. However I have checked and rechecked that A.EXE and B.DLL are set to use “x86” as the platform target. I’ve also tried cleaning and rebuilding the entire solution. B.DLL builds with no errors or warnings.

This is a previously working project. I’m currently working on refactoring it by moving some code out of A.EXE an into the newly-created B.DLL.

I tried setting A.EXE to “Any CPU” and it didn’t help (I didn’t expect it to). Changing it back to “x86” didn’t help either.

I am targeting .NET 3.5

Update

I created a new C# class library C.DLL and added a reference to B.DLL. C.DLL is set to x86 and it compiles fine.

Update

The compile-time error occurs in MainForm.resx at a closing “data” tag:

  <data name="StatusStripImages.ImageStream"
  mimetype="application/x-microsoft.net.object.binary.base64">
    <value>
    ...
    </value>
  </data>

Update

I now suspect resgen.exe. I tried forcing it to be 32-bit and I broke it (see: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vseditorprerelease/thread/6782c692-a9b6-4930-a099-4ee4092e91a9).

Any ideas?

thanks, Andy

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    It seems I am suffering from a bug [1] in Visual Studio 2010 that Microsoft can’t be bothered to fix even though they’ve known about it for months.

    There are three workarounds and I just changed A.EXE and B.DLL from .NET 3.5 to .NET 4.0 to solve it. Not ideal but I didn’t want to make changes to resgen.exe. I guess I have to wait for SP1 to be able to target .NET 3.5.

    [1] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2010/06/19/resgen-exe-error-an-attempt-was-made-to-load-a-program-with-an-incorrect-format.aspx

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