How to load side by side same name DLLs (Visual Studio)

Question

I have a question about side-by-side assemblies.

Here's the situation:

I have an executable, app.exe, which loads plugins by searching a plugins directory. app.exe depends on a certain A.dll.

I'm developing a plugin which depends on an older, customized version of A.dll that has the same name. Updating this older, customized version to the newer version is impossible, so I thought I might be able to load the two A.dll files simultaneously.

Here's the directory structure:

\bin
    app.exe
    A.dll (newer version)
    \plugins
        myplugin.dll

Both versions of A.dll themselves depend on a huge number of other DLLs, which could have similar version problems. (I should also mention I'm working with a 64-bit application, if that makes a difference.)

How do I set this up in Visual Studio such that I can load both A.dll libraries at the same time, so that myplugin.dll uses the older version, whereas app.exe uses the newer version?

Answer 1

Since these are plugins, you load them by calling LoadLibrary, or similar. In which case you can simply pass the full path to the DLL in order to load it.