Assembly loading problem in Winlogon, Windows 2000 ..
Hello All..
We are attempting to load a .Net assembly DLL from
a GINA (Winlogon) DLL. This is a C# DLL.
In Windows XP, this works fine. In Windows 2000
however, we get this error:
The given assembly name or codebase XYZ was invalid.
(XYZ is the name of our DLL)
We have determined (I think) that this does _not_ mean
the DLL was not found.. there seems to be something
else about the assembly/DLL that bothers the loader.
Once the user is logged on to Win2K, this DLL works
fine.. it is the Winlogon invocation that fails.
The DLL is in the GAC.
Has anybody run into this sort of problem ?
Thank you..
Cris..
[687 byte] By [
CrisV] at [2007-12-16]
Hello Cris,
I haven't seen anybody attempt to write a GINA in managed code. Injecting the runtime into WinLogon seems like a precarious scenario, since previous versions of the CLR and the base class library were not tested for integration into the OS startup/login.
You can read Christopher Brumme's CLR Architecture blog post on reliability here.
I would be very interested in understanding your login scenario better, and why you chose to integrate managed code directly into WinLogin [as a GINA].
For loader debugging, you can find more information at Suzanne Cook's Loader blog.
Hope that helps,
Stephen
http://blogs.msdn.com/stfisher