The official word on the solution of the “dllhost.exe.config dilemma” or “How to use XML config with Enterprise Services”

Steve Swartz, who is one of my very good personal friends and who is, that “personal function” aside, Program Manager in Microsoft’s Indigo team and also was the lead architect for a lot of the new functionality that we got in the Windows Server 2003 version of Enterprise Services (COM+ 1.5 for the old fashioned folks), wrote a comment on my previous post on this topic, where I explained how you can get the XML configuration story of the Framework to work with Enterprise Services using the .NET Framework 1.1.

In response to what I wrote, someone asked whether this would also work on Windows XP, because I was explicitly talking about Windows Server 2003. Steve’s answer to that question completes the picture and therefore it shouldn’t be buried in the comments. Steve writes:

In fact, this will work on XP and Windows Server 2003 so long as you have NETFX 1.1. The field has been there since XP; in NETFX 1.1, we set the current directory for the managed app domain.

This field was originally added to configure unmanaged fusion contexts. In that capacity, the field works with library and server apps alike. In its capacity as a setter of current appdomain directory, it works less well with library apps (natch).