Many thanks for your help identifying and explaining this issue.  The small subset of Excel-specific AR Reports utilities we have been using did not require the Document or Chart assemblies to be present hence we did not previously include them in our solution.  Regardless we would appreciate and make use of the potential feature you mention which would allow for flagging assemblies to be ignored during probing.

 

Thanks again.

 

In the next release we will make the code more resilient so that the services still start despite these types of errors.  We've also opened a feature request to provide a means of filtering the assemblies probed.

 

Thanks for the confirmation Kim - I have forwarded the two ActiveReports assemblies to your email.

 

Is this something particular to the ActiveReports libraries or can we expect to potentially run into this issue with other 3rd party components as well?

The error is occurring when building up the MEF catalog - by default this looks at all assemblies in the bin folder.  Unfortunately there's currently no way to tell this lookup to exclude certain files. 

 

Until we get this fixed, you may be able to work around the problem by placing the AR assemblies in a subfolder and then tweaking the web.config: adding the folder to the probing path and the assemblies to the list of assemblies:

 

 <runtime>
    <assemblyBinding xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1">
      <probing privatePath="bin;bin/AR"  />
     </assemblyBinding>
  </runtime>

 

   <compilation debug="true" targetFramework="4.0">
      <assemblies>
        <add assembly="AR_Assembly1, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=..." />

      </assemblies>
    </compilation>

 

Alternately you could do the above with IdeaBlade/application assemblies and modify the MEF search path, but that's slightly more involved.  If you want to try this I can supply more information.

See stack trace below. 

 

The issue can be recreated very easily by adding references to the ActiveReports assemblies to the Silverlight web project.  I can email you the 2 assemblies if you would like to repro.

 

[ReflectionTypeLoadException: Unable to load one or more of the requested types. Retrieve the LoaderExceptions property for more information.]
   System.Reflection.RuntimeModule.GetTypes(RuntimeModule module) +0
   System.Reflection.RuntimeModule.GetTypes() +4
   System.Reflection.Assembly.GetTypes() +78
   System.ComponentModel.Composition.Hosting.AssemblyCatalog.get_InnerCatalog() +113
   System.ComponentModel.Composition.Hosting.AssemblyCatalog.get_Parts() +7
   IdeaBlade.Core.Composition.PartsCatalog.LoadCatalog() +347
   IdeaBlade.Core.Composition.PartsCatalog..ctor() +37
   IdeaBlade.Core.Composition.CompositionHost..ctor() +140
   IdeaBlade.Core.Composition.CompositionHost.get_Instance() +165
   IdeaBlade.EntityModel.Server.EntityServiceHost.get_ServiceHostEventHandler() +45
   IdeaBlade.EntityModel.Server.EntityServiceHost.OnCreated() +31
   IdeaBlade.EntityModel.Server.EntityServiceHost..ctor(Type serviceType, Uri[] baseAddresses) +50
   IdeaBlade.EntityModel.Server.EntityServiceHostFactory.CreateHostCore(Type serviceType, Uri[] baseAddresses) +53
   IdeaBlade.EntityModel.Server.EntityServiceHostFactory.CreateServiceHost(Type serviceType, Uri[] baseAddresses) +81
   System.ServiceModel.Activation.ServiceHostFactory.CreateServiceHost(String constructorString, Uri[] baseAddresses) +420
   System.ServiceModel.HostingManager.CreateService(String normalizedVirtualPath) +1440
   System.ServiceModel.HostingManager.ActivateService(String normalizedVirtualPath) +44
   System.ServiceModel.HostingManager.EnsureServiceAvailable(String normalizedVirtualPath) +615

[ServiceActivationException: The service '/EntityService.svc' cannot be activated due to an exception during compilation.  The exception message is: Unable to load one or more of the requested types. Retrieve the LoaderExceptions property for more information..]
   System.Runtime.AsyncResult.End(IAsyncResult result) +679246
   System.ServiceModel.Activation.HostedHttpRequestAsyncResult.End(IAsyncResult result) +190
   System.ServiceModel.Activation.HostedHttpRequestAsyncResult.ExecuteSynchronous(HttpApplication context, String routeServiceVirtualPath, Boolean flowContext, Boolean ensureWFService) +234
   System.ServiceModel.Activation.HttpModule.ProcessRequest(Object sender, EventArgs e) +355
   System.Web.SyncEventExecutionStep.System.Web.HttpApplication.IExecutionStep.Execute() +148
   System.Web.HttpApplication.ExecuteStep(IExecutionStep step, Boolean& completedSynchronously) +75

 

1. Create a new project using the DevForce Silverlight Application template.
2. Create a domain model in the web project.
3. Instantiate, Connect the Entity Manager in MainPage.xaml - everything works fine.
4. Add references to the ActiveReports library in the web project, try again, and we begin experiencing the issues with EntityService.

5. Clean solution, remove ActiveReports references, rebuild, run and the EntityService starts working as expected again.

 

 

I can provide the ActiveReports libraries or an example project if you'd like to test out on your end.