Extension ships with a newer Newtonsoft.Json than Visual Studio 2017

[kzu]

The currently published extension ships with Json.NET version 10.0.x whereas VS ships built-in with 9.0.x. It's strongly advised that you do not ship newer versions of built-in VS assemblies, since that can cause incompatibilities or breakages in other packages.

Might be related to https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/content/problem/287648/xamarin-android-and-ios-projects-will-not-load-aft.html.

[grokys]

The reason we're now doing this is that one of our dependencies uses 10.0. I can check whether that dependency is happy with 9.0, but if not, what is the recommended way of fixing this?

[jcansdale]

@kzu 👋 should we treat Newtonsoft.Json as a Visual Studio assembly and not package it at all?

[kzu]

That's tricky. We had package load failures in some cases if we didn't distribute it, so we always make sure we distribute the same version as the VS we ship with :(

[kzu]

Also of interest: VS ships with binding redirects for this, currently:

			<dependentAssembly>
				<assemblyIdentity name="Newtonsoft.Json" publicKeyToken="30ad4fe6b2a6aeed" culture="neutral"/>
				<bindingRedirect oldVersion="1.0.0.0-9.0.0.0" newVersion="9.0.0.0"/>
			</dependentAssembly>

So you can build against any older version, but not newer.

[jcansdale]

@kzu,

It appears VS 2015 only knows about 4.5.0.0-6.0.0.0:

                <dependentAssembly>
                    <assemblyIdentity name="Newtonsoft.Json" publicKeyToken="30ad4fe6b2a6aeed" culture="neutral"/>
                    <bindingRedirect oldVersion="4.5.0.0-6.0.0.0" newVersion="6.0.0.0"/>
                </dependentAssembly>

Do you know what is happening to cause the breakage? I can't immediately think of a scenario short of an extension calling Assembly.Load("Newtonsoft.Json") and assuming a particular version. I'd like to understand what's going on here.

I'm wondering if we should be using a [ProvideCodeBase] attribute for Newtonsoft.Json? We're now using ProvideBindingPath to make sure that our assemblies can be resolved (including from .imagemanifest, see #1236).

This will have the side effect of making our version of Newtonsoft.Json available via Assembly.Load("Newtonsoft.Json"). We could put it on a different path and explicitly specify its code base.