WinFX installation problem and fix for it

One day I’ve decided to install WinFX (along with VS 2005 beta 2) on my laptop to see how it works on hardware accelerated graphics (I take a look at WinFX before – in VMWare Workstation though). So I installed everything as requested. The first step to test it was to run XAML Pad, a utility to build UI using XAML. No go. I took a look at Fusion Log Viewer (fuslogvw) I saw that XamlPad application tried (unsuccessfully) to load totaly unrelated 3rd party assemblies built for .net 1.x (plus some of .net 1.0 system assemblies). Go figure. I haven’t put much effort into solving this (who has time to play these days). I’ve rather posted a reply to a guy having same problem in MS newsgroup microsoft.public.windows.developer.winfx.avalon (“XamlPad.exe NullReferencException with WinFX CTP Sept.” thread).


After a while, Daniel Danilin found (in another post in same thread) an (obvious) solution: remove offending 3rd party (not .net 1.x system ones) assemblies from GAC. While this solution isn’t perfect (what about applications that use those assemblies?) it just works – and I have something to play with while traveling to my second MVP summit.

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