I have an year or so old application which uses Expression Encoder 3 to generate thumbnails. Few of the users are complaining that they are receiving the following exception:
Could not load file or assembly 'Microsoft.Expression.Encoder.Utilities.dll' or one of its dependencies. This application has failed to start because the application configuration is incorrect.
The application contains in itself the required EE3 assemblies in the setup, so as such installation of Expression Encoder is not required.
All these crashes started to occur after the application was upgraded to .net 4.
Any clues on what might be happening?
[EDIT] Was able to reproduce the issue on one of our local systems. We did a clean install of Windows XP. Installed .net 4 and then our app. It crashed with the same exception. We could fix the issue by installing .net 3.5!
I was quick to point fingers at .net 4 backward compatibility.
So the question remains: any clues on what might be happening?
According to this question this seems to be an issue with EE3 itself in that it requires EE to be installed (via the installer) to work properly.
Sadly this also seems to be the case for EE4, according to this thread, due to a codec licence issue.
Sorry :/
Have you looked at MediaFoundation? it might serve as an alternative, although ive never used it myself.