Sunday, January 02, 2011

The application has failed to start because its side-by-side configuration is incorrect. Please see the application event log for more detail.

An application may crash with the following error message "The application has failed to start because its side-by-side configuration is in correct. Please see the application event log for more detail."
In the Application Event Viewer log:

Activation context generation failed for "C:\.....\App.exe". Dependent Assembly Microsoft.VC80.DebugCRT,processorArchitecture="x86",publicKeyToken="1fc8b3b9a1e18e3b",type="win32",version="8.0.50608.0" could not be found. Please use sxstrace.exe for detailed diagnose.

In order to diagnose side-by-side errors, start SxSTracing using the below command:

SxsTrace Trace -logfile:SxsTrace.etl

Then run your application that is causing the problem (reproduce the issue). Once it is done, press Enter to stop the tracing and use the below command to generated a text formatted file of the output.
sxstrace Parse -logfile:SxSTrace.etl -outfile:SxSTrace.txt
Reviewing the generated text file should give details of each of the loaded modules and the bindings.
For example:

ERROR: Cannot resolve reference Microsoft.VC90.ATL,processorArchitecture="x86",publicKeyToken="1fc8b3b9a1e18e3b",type="win32",version="9.0.21022.8". ERROR: Activation Context generation failed. End Activation Context Generation.

In this scenario, I installed VC runtime (x86) version="9.0.21022.8" on the system to resolve the issue. The package Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Service Pack 1 Redistributable Package ATL Security Update is available at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?familyid=2051A0C1-C9B5-4B0A-A8F5-770A549FD78C&displaylang=en

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