[Question] type sharing when plugin has a newer version of a dependency?

[FramnkRulez]

Is type sharing supported when a plugin has a newer version of a dependency than the host process? I am having issues getting this to work when I deploy a plugin with an interface from an assembly with a slighly higher build version (no breaking interface changes). I load the plugin assembly as per examples:

using (var loader = McMaster.NETCore.Plugins.PluginLoader.CreateFromAssemblyFile(pluginPath, config => config.PreferSharedTypes = true))

(In this case I'm setting default behavior to prefer all, but I've also tried explicitly listing the interface with no luck).

Then I run this code to verify the interface I loaded is assignable:

foreach (var pluginType in loader .LoadDefaultAssembly() .GetTypes() .Where(t => typeof(IPlugin).IsAssignableFrom(t) && !t.IsAbstract))

However the 'IsAssignableFrom(t)' is always false when I attempt to load a plugin where the IPlugin interface is contained in a slightly higher build than the host process. The only difference in the IPlugin interface is that the host loads it from an assembly versioned 1.0.3.15 and the plugin includes it from an assembly versioned 1.0.4.3 (an intentional change on my part to repro this - no code changes at all between these versions).

I was under the impression this was what type sharing was designed to solve, but perhaps I am using it incorrectly or have wrong expectations? How would I go about troubleshooting this?

[jeddytier4]

I've hit the same issue recently, though I don't have a definitive test to say when this began happening. In my case, I was lucky that it was an internal package that was setting the version higher and was able to lower it for the time-being.

That said, I agree and thought this was what preferred types was supposed to fix, by forcing the assembly using the higher version to unify with the host, but that was not working with any of my configurations.

[NicolasDorier]

same issue here.

[NicolasDorier]

I tracked that down to https://github.com/natemcmaster/DotNetCorePlugins/blob/main/src/Plugins/Loader/ManagedLoadContext.cs#L102 throwing an exception if the version assemblyName is higher than the version in the default load context.

[NicolasDorier]

I published a new package BTCPayServer.NETCore.Plugins.Mvc or BTCPayServer.NETCore.Plugins which is a fork of this project with the fix in the PR. I @natemcmaster merge my PR or address it, then I advise you to use nate's package instead.

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