I have a managed C++ assembly I'm loading dynamically in an unmanaged c++ application through a standard LoadLibrary() call. The managed C++ assembly has dependencies on several more managed (C#) assemblies. Everything worked fine until I moved all the managed assemblies to a subdirectory of the unmananged application. To illustrate:
Managed C++ .dll (MyCoolDll.dll)
Unmanaged C++ app (MyCoolApp.exe)
This worked fine, until I moved MyCoolDll.dll, DotNetDll1.dll & DotNetDll2.dll to /someSubDirectory (the code in MyCoolApp.exe was updated to LoadLibrary("someSubDirectory/MyCooldll.dll")
I'm guessing when MyCoolDll.dll is loaded, it's trying to find DotNetDll1.dll and DotNetDll2.dll in the working directory, instead of the directory it lives in.
How can I tell MyCoolDll.dll its dependencies live in a subdirectory? It's a library running inside of an unmanaged app, so I don't think I can specify this in an app.config or anything?
The CLR gets loaded in an unusual way in this scenario, through a thunk that the compiler injected when compiling the native export for __declspec(dllexport). Doing this is fine, it just isn't particularly fast.
The CLR will go out hunting for a .config file to initialize the primary AppDomain. And will look for MyCoolApp.exe.config, regardless that this is not a managed executable at all. You can use the <probing> element to add subdirectories to search for assemblies.