I’ve started working on a new project for work, it’s going to be a fairly large build job. Recently we started looking at various ORM’s, for a number of reasons we settled on the Telerik OpenAccess product. The Visual Studio integration is pretty nice and it has all the features that you would expect from a commercial ORM, the one complaint that I have is the limited LINQ support.
In any case I ran into a problem with some prototype code, I had setup a post build script to run that would copy the assembly to a SharePoint bin directory, but I would always get the following error message when I tried to execute any ORM related code:
“Telerik.OpenAccess: No enhanced assembly has been found for meta-data construction. This may be caused by a missing app.config file (use app.config as embedded resource then) or by an insufficient references section in the configuration file (add the referenced enhanced assemblies there too) or by a wrong enhancement setting; please check your configuration”
It turns out that the Telerik tool uses a tool called VEnhance which will inject IL into your assembly, this IL is responsible for tracking changes in your persisted entities. What was happening was the build event would run before the VEnhance tool, so it was copying the assembly without the ‘enhancements’. An easy way to tell is to compare the assembly size, obviously the ‘enhanced’ version will be larger.