Troubleshooting BadImageFormatException

Question

Verified build settings such as Platform Target are all the same (x86).

That's not what the crash log says:

Assembly manager loaded from: C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64

Note the 64 in the name, that's the home of the 64-bit version of the framework. Set the Target platform setting on your EXE project, not your class library project. The XxxDevicesService EXE project determines the bitness of the process.

After I stopped banging my head on the desk thinking of the entire week I spent running down this problem, I am sharing what worked for me. I have Win7 64 bit, 32-bit Oracle Client, and have my MVC 5 project set to run on x86 platform because of the Oracle bitness. I kept getting the same errors:

Could not load file or assembly 'Oracle.DataAccess' or one of its dependencies. An attempt was made to load a program with an incorrect format.

I reloaded the NuGet packages, I used copies of the DLLs that worked for others in different apps, I set the codebase in the dependent assembly to point to my project's bin folder, I tried CopyLocal as true or false, I tried everything. Finally I had enough else done I wanted to check in my code, and as a new contractor I didn't have subversion set up. While looking for a way to hook it into VS, I tripped over the answer. What I found worked was unchecking the "Use the 64 bit version of IIS Express for Web Sites and Projects" option under the Projects and Solutions => Web Projects section under the Tools=>Options menu.

What I found worked was checking the "Use the 64 bit version of IIS Express for Web Sites and Projects" option under the Projects and Solutions => Web Projects section under the Tools=>Options menu.

It can typically occur when you changed the target framework of .csproj and reverted it back to what you started with.

Make sure 1 if supportedRuntime version="a different runtime from cs project target" under startup tag in app.config.

Make sure 2 That also means checking other autogenerated or other files in may be properties folder to see if there is no more runtime mismatch between these files and one that is defined in .csproj file.

These might just save you lot of time before you start trying different things with project properties to overcome the error.

I had the same problem even though I have 64-bit Windows 7 and i was loading a 64bit DLL b/c in Project properties | Build I had "Prefer 32-bit" checked. (Don't know why that's set by default). Once I unchecked that, everything ran fine

You can also get this exception when your application target .NET Framework 4.5 (for example) and you have the following app.config :

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<configuration>
  <startup>
    <supportedRuntime version="v2.0.50727" />
    <supportedRuntime version="v4.0" />
  </startup>
</configuration>

When trying to launch the debug of the application you will get the BadImageFormatException.

Removing the line declaring the v2.0 version will clear the error.

I had this issue recently when I tried to change the target platform from an old .NET 2.0 project to .NET 4.5.