Binding redirect support

[mamaso]

Per this customer issue:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/40816285/azure-functions-with-nuget-packages-that-have-different-versions-of-the-same-dep#

[fabiocav]

This is a known limitation and, with the current design, not something that can be easily addressed. I'm adding a comment in the SO question as the root cause is not directly related to redirects.

[jorupp]

Is there another way to work around the issues binding redirects are usually used for? For example, I want to use the WebJobs nuget package, which requires 7.2.1 or higher of WindowsAzure.Storage. However, 8.1.1 is out, which updates a bunch of stuff, including adding support for block blob uploads. Then, when I declare a function as taking in a IQueryable<DynamicTableEntity>, I'm stuck - if I reference the 8.1.1 version to get the functionality I want, I get an error at function bind time that it DynamicTableEntity doesn't implement ITableEntity.

Or is there another way to achieve this besides binding redirect support?

[Blackbaud-MitchellThomas]

Is this worth looking at, @jorupp?

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/appserviceteam/2017/03/16/publishing-a-net-class-library-as-a-function-app/

The development experience using this approach has been so much better for me.

[jorupp]

@Blackbaud-MitchellThomas - it has the same basic issue - no binding redirects. In fact, I hadn't run into the issue myself until I switched to that approach yesterday and updated all my nuget packages to the latest (since I had the package GUI to tell me about it). I got binding errors because the latest Microsoft.Azure.WebJobs needed an older version of WindowsAzure.Storage, and didn't recognize the 8.1.1 types as matching the 7.2.1 types it had loaded (since there was no binding redirect to force them to both load the 8.1.1 types).

[Blackbaud-MitchellThomas]

That's good to know that it's still a potential gap. I have a project running in that format, and it cleared up my flavor of these issues. But my problem was that it was erroring looking for a given .dll and couldn't find it, so I had been able to figure out to supply it with the csx file.

[christopheranderson]

Blocked on this work: #1319

[jorupp]

Could there be a way to work around this temporarily by providing the data on what version of an assembly to use in another form (ie. JSON file) and handling the AppDomain.AssemblyResolve event? Just thinking out loud here.

[danielmackay]

Is there any possible work around for this? We have just tried to migrate from web jobs to functions, but our application depends on Micosoft.Owin.Security 3.1.0.0, but internally Asp.Net Identity depends on Micosoft.Owin.Security 2.1.0.0. We cannot migrate to functions as we would like to until this is supported.

[RudyCo]

This is a major issue. How can Microsoft state that Azure Functions are ready for use in production environments with such limitation?