hubFS: THE place for F#

Hey everyone,

I just noticed that FSI (it seems) has a slight bug where it assume that a referenced assembly is a DLL (when, in fact, a .NET assembly could be either a DLL or an EXE).

I realize it's not good programming practice to reference EXEs, and I'm refactoring my code into an EXE and a DLL, but I just thought I'd post this here for what it's worth.

Here's my script:

#I @"..\CSADesigner\bin\Debug" ;;
#r @"CSADesigner.exe" ;;

And here's my transcript from FSI (in VS 2008):

>
--> Added '{path-to-stuff}\..\CSADesigner\bin\Debug' to library include path

>
--> Referenced '{path-to-stuff}\..\CSADesigner\bin\Debug\CSADesigner.exe'

> > let s = new SimulationOptions();;

  let s = new SimulationOptions();;
  ------------^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

stdin(2,12): error: FS0039: The type constructor 'SimulationOptions' is not defined.
stopped due to error

> open CSADesigner.Configuration;;

> let s = new SimulationOptions();;

val s : SimulationOptions

stdin(0,0): error: Unable to find the file CSADesigner.dll in any of
 C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\
 C:\WINDOWS\system32\..\assembly\GAC\Microsoft.Office.Interop.Owc11\11.0.0.0__71e9bce111e9429c
 C:\Program Files\Xceed Components\Bin\.NET\Signed DLLs
 {path-to-stuff}\..\CSADesigner\bin\Debug
 {path-to-stuff}
 C:\Program Files\FSharp-1.9.3.7\bin.

Could not load file or assembly 'CSADesigner, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.

Hope that helps someone :)

(offtopic: man, this HTML editor control has got to be the most frustrating thing to use.  It is completely unusable in Firefox, and only marginally works in IE.  What's up with the multiple newlines for everything that gets pasted?  And why doesn't the F# code formatting work all of the time?)

Yep, this is a known issue: F# 1.9.3 can't reference .EXE assemblies as if they were DLLs. Thanks for the report.