Back again...

Friday I tried to get James (a mail server) to run under IKVM. First thing I ran into was the lack of support for extensions. That turned out to be easy to add. The next problem wasn't so easy to get around. I started getting TypeLoadExceptions. The only way this can happen is if there is a bug in IKVM or in the .NET runtime, because if a Java class cannot be found IKVM should throw a ClassNotFoundException or a NoClassDefError.

After much debugging I managed to isolate the problem as a bug the .NET runtime. Here is a small C# reproduction.

The problem was triggered by the new extension class loader, which creates a second dynamic assembly to emit the dynamically generated .NET types in. It turns out that references from one dynamic assembly to another dynamic assembly sometimes do not result in an AppDomain.TypeResolve event. The trigger for this is that the type being referenced was first defined inside another TypeResolve event.