workaround needed: notify a user that exe is missing dependencies from within the application?

I wrote a quick console application that uses SharePoint dll files. If I attempt to run it on a machine that doesn't have said dll files, the application immediately crashes upon opening.

I'm definitely a newbie, but I would prefer if there was a way the application could tell the user they are using it on a wrong machine, before it hard crashed. Is there a way of doing this other than writing a second application to scan for dependencies, to be run prior to the application in question? If I put the code that needs dependencies in a separate class, that isn't instantiated until the application has checked it is on the correct compute开发者_StackOverflow社区r, will the application still fail immediately on opening? Surely someone has figured out a workaround for this sort of situation.

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Unfortunately you will have to write a launcher application - if you think about it, the required DLLs need to be there for the main application to even start. If you embed the scan in your main application, it will not start due to the missing DLLs.

You may be able to use a plugin architecture that scans for required DLLs and loads them dynamically (MEF comes to mind).

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How about wrapping the load of that dll into:

 try { 
      Assembly.Load(..);
 }
 catch(TypeLoadException ex) {

         //Let the user know which type from what dll was not loaded.
 }

You will have to load that dll at runtime to actually do that though.

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It might be possible to copy the assemblies to the output directory for sharepoint. So references are made locally.

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if your application references directly the SharePoint dlls or assemblies there is no way to notify the user because the .NET CLR will not execute your code if any of the statically linked needed assemblies is not available.

you can either use some kind of dynamic loading of the SharePoint assembly and types so at the startup time the application does not need that assembly to execute, or you create a launcher for your application which does the check and if all is ok starts your application otherwise notifies the user.