Side by side errors are troublesome to troubleshoot. Side by Side concept is cool but got screwed by the numerous ifs and buts that got into this technology. Side by Side errors are hard to figure out hence there is a dedicated tool to help figure the errors out. The intention was to solve dll hell but this itself went on to become a bigger hell making bloggers like me to blog on this issue. Viewing Manifest file embedded into an executable file What does Side by Side Solve? The OS application loader will pick up this file from the application’s resource section and will figure out application dependencies from the manifest entries. This file will be embedded into the binary as a resource of type RT_MANIFEST which is just an XML file. If you build your application then you should see following line in the build output window... 1>Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. Visual Studio creates a manifest file in the intermediate output folder which follows the following naming convention.Ī How is a manifest embedded into an application? Mostly side by side dependencies are specified via #pragma comment statements or Visual Studio creates a manifest file which is then embedded into the binary using mt.exe. For developers all they need is to embed a manifest into their application which I guess most of you would know. All these elements make up a unique folder/file name. Well internally the binaries are placed into different folders based on type, name, version, processorArchitecture and publickeytoken. Side by Side implementation allows binaries co-exist side by side even with identical names.