Why is Mscoree.lib So Old?

Heath Stewart

January 10th, 20060 0

Some people have noticed that mscoree.lib in the Program FilesMicrosoft Visual Studio 2005VCPlatfromSDKLib directory is older than the release date for .NET 2.0. If you run dumpbin.exe on the two libraries you’ll see vastly different time stamps:

> dumpbin.exe /headers “Program FilesMicrosoft Visual Studio 8VCPlatfromSDKLibmscoree.lib”
Dump of file C:Program FilesMicrosoft Visual Studio 8VCPlatformSDKlibmscoree.lib

File Type: LIBRARY

FILE HEADER VALUES
             14C machine (x86)
               3 number of sections
        3BEF5B8C time date stamp Sun Nov 11 21:18:04 2001
             10C file pointer to symbol table
               8 number of symbols
               0 size of optional header
             100 characteristics
              32 bit word machine
…

> dumpbin.exe /headers “Program FilesMicrosoft Visual Studio 8SDKv2.0Libmscoree.lib”
Dump of file C:Program FilesMicrosoft Visual Studio 8SDKv2.0Libmscoree.lib

File Type: LIBRARY

FILE HEADER VALUES
             14C machine (x86)
               3 number of sections
        4333A1D6 time date stamp Thu Sep 22 23:33:58 2005
             10C file pointer to symbol table
               8 number of symbols
               0 size of optional header
             100 characteristics
              32 bit word machine
…

It’s only reasonable that the Platform SDK wouldn’t have the .NET 2.0 drop of mscoree.lib, however, since the current Platform SDK drop for the release of Visual Studio 8 is geared toward Windows Server 2003 and down-level platforms.

To get the latest versions of mscoree.lib and for the other supported processor architectures – both x64 and IA64 – you should download the appropriate Microsoft .NET Framework SDK from http://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/downloads/updates/default.aspx. I’ve enumerated the current SDK downloads for your convenience here: