Managing the evolution of .NET programs.

DLL Hell is what Microsoft calls its version of our Java library problem and the .NET component framework was partly designed to solve it. In this paper we constructed a formal model of the .NET ‘assembly cache' and verified its properties useing Alloy, the MIT structural modelling language. The literature reveals few examples of formal verification applied to Microsoft designs and our model features as an exemplar of Alloy in the Imperial College curriculum and in Logic and Computer Science: Modelling and Reasoning about Systems, by M. Huth and M. Ryan (CUP, 2004)