Question

I use LINQPad to connect to different environments, say “local”, and “development”. The connection settings are in LINQPad.exe’s config file.

To help me organize my settings, I thought I’d make a couple of copies of LINQPad.exe, renaming them with corresponding config files, like this:

• LINQPad.local.exe
• LINQPad.local.config
• LINQPad.development.exe
• LINQPad.development.config

But LINQPad.exe complains at start up:

The application must be named LINKPad.exe in order to run.

Why is this?

PS Clearly I’m not asking how to manage my config files (I have different folders now) – I was more curious as to what programming reason there could be to enforce the name of a process?

Answer 1

If you look at the source in Reflector, you’ll see that it requires a specific name.

if (Path.GetFileName(Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().Location).ToLowerInvariant() != "linqpad.exe")
{
    MessageBox.Show("The application must be named LINQPad.exe in order to run.", "LINQPad");
}

It also references config files by name, so it may enforce the assembly name just to keep things simple.