Conflicting COM Interop DLL Names

Recently our job scheduling software got a version bump from 5 to 6 and I'm in charge of bringing our support libraries up to date. A quick look into the changelog showed that I would have to do some under the hood work, but I have a relatively abstracted class library which would be easy to add support for version 6.

Not so fast. The job scheduler uses COM objects as its method of interaction, and .Net has to build an interop assembly to talk to it. The easy way, Add Reference -> COM, should work. It should work, provided the COM DLL's have different names. Thanks to Murphy's Law, the two DLL's, while under different folders, have the same name!

.Net generates Interop.X.dll and Interop.X.dll, even though the two are in different folders and represent different versions, solely because our job scheduler's COM DLL is X.dll, in both folders. While this is not necessarily their fault, it certainly makes the lives of those of us who do integration harder (their COM object model is pretty bad to start with).

Thankfully, Microsoft provides the means to create your own Primary Interop Assembly from a DLL. Using TlbImp you can create your own COM Interop DLL, complete with a non-conflicting name and namespace.

TlbImp version5\X.dll /namespace:X /out:Interop.X.dll
TlbImp version6\X.dll /namespace:X6 /out:Interop.X6.dll

Now I can import these two conflict free and deal with more important issues, like the poor documentation included with the COM library.