How to declare a friend assembly?

c# visual-studio-2008 assembly-signing

I have 2 projects in my solution:

Assembly (Basic Library) Test Assembly (NUnit)

I had declared the test assembly as friends assembly in first project:

[assembly: InternalsVisibleTo ("Company.Product.Tests")]

Everything was working fine till I realised that I have forgot to setup the solution to sign my assemblies. So created a snk file and setup the visual studio project to sign the first assembly (Basic Library). Now when I compile the first project, I get following error:

Friend assembly reference 'Company.Product.Tests' is invalid. Strong-name signed assemblies must specify a public key in their InternalsVisibleTo declarations.

I tried to extract the public key from my snk file using sn utility but it generates a wired binary file which I am unsure how to use. How can I fix the problem?

Jon Skeet

You need to sign both assemblies, because effectively both assemblies reference each other.

You have to put the public key in the InternalsVisibleTo attribute. For example, in Protocol Buffers I use:

[assembly:InternalsVisibleTo("Google.ProtocolBuffers.Test,PublicKey="+
"00240000048000009400000006020000002400005253413100040000010001008179f2dd31a648"+
"2a2359dbe33e53701167a888e7c369a9ae3210b64f93861d8a7d286447e58bc167e3d99483beda"+
"72f738140072bb69990bc4f98a21365de2c105e848974a3d210e938b0a56103c0662901efd6b78"+
"0ee6dbe977923d46a8fda18fb25c65dd73b149a5cd9f3100668b56649932dadd8cf5be52eb1dce"+
"ad5cedbf")]

The public key is retrieved by running

sn -Tp path\to\test\assembly.dll

Alternatively, get it from the .snk file:

sn -p MyStrongnameKey.snk public.pk
sn -tp public.pk

And it is damn irritating to see the MSDN documentation (msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/…) mention ridiculously short public key which almost look like public key token to me.

You can extract the public key directly from a .snk file: sn -k MyStrongnameKey.snk // sn -p MyStrongnameKey.snk public.pk // sn -tp public.pk //

I was using the 'assembly title' specified in AssemblyInfo.cs. Since then deduced the right name to use is the 'assembly name' from the project's Properties/Application dialog (which differs again from project's name in Visual Studio's solution explorer).

As helpful as these answers and comments have been, I needed some experimentation to realize that the public key is the one from the assembly containing the tests, NOT the assembly that contains the 'InternalsInvisibleTo' declaration.

@Andreas: Well it goes along with the assembly you're naming - you're specifying the strong name of the assembly to trust, within the assembly that's doing the trusting.

ezyuzin

You can directrly get publicKey from assembly which you interest, without magic with sn.exe

<!-- language: c# -->
var assemblyName = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().GetName();
Console.WriteLine("{0}, PublicKey={1}",
    assemblyName.Name,
string.Join("", assemblyName.GetPublicKey().Select(m => string.Format("{0:x2}", m))));

This is not an answer to this question. It should be a comment on the answer it is addressing

user95319

I think you need to put in the strong name, which would be something like "Company.Product.Tests, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=17135d9fcba0119f". I assume Company.Product.Tests is your assembly name and 17135d9fcba0119f is the public key.

Another way to resolve this problem would be not to use separate assemblies. I usually put the source code and the testing code in the same assembly. I don't know if you have any special concern that you must separate them.

I dont think we need to specify the version number and culture (see msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/…). I havent really tried putting the test code in the assembly itself. Will try and see how it works (+1 for the tip).

For InternalsVisibleTo, PublicKeToken is not enough. You need the entire public key :-(

How to declare a friend assembly?

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