That’s a quick one. There’s been a new release of log4net recently that’s signed with a new key, and therefore is incompatible with old version 1.2.10.
Therefore, due to near-ubiquity of the library in .NET space, it may cause some problems if you happen to have a dependency (direct or indirect) on it.
The matters are made worse by Nuget’s default of getting the latest available version of the package. I dealt with this problem the other day, and I saw a few people in my twitter stream struggling with the same issue.
The solution is quite simple. It’s not specific to log4net and I’m not picking on log4net here. Here’s how you can restrict Nuget’s package to specific version in your solution.
So imagine you install a package that has a dependency on log4net. In this case, the dependency is specified as specifically version 1.2.10 (as opposed to Nuget’s default: this version of newer).
If after that we install another package that also depends on log4net but doesn’t restrict the version, we’ll have a problem.
The package we were trying to install doesn’t get installed. Actually, even if it did, we would have a problem since it most likely was compiled against log4net 1.2.10 anyway, and if Nuget updated log4net to version 1.2.11 the app would throw an exception at runtime due to mismatched assembly.
So there is a solution to restrict version of the package to specific version (in this case 1.2.10) as specified in the documentation.
After adding allowedVersions=”[1.2.10]” we can try again and this time the package will install properly.
Notice it says it installed log4net 1.2.11. I checked my packages folder, and project dependencies and the version referenced was 1.2.10 so all is good.
Hope that helps