I’ve spent my entire train journey trying to get to the bottom of this, so I thought I'd blog it for posterity. In my crazed Reflection.Emit frenzy, my unit tests were erroring with PEVerify complaining about illegal ldlen codes:
[offset 0x....] Expected single-dimension zero-based array.
If you're doing meta-programming, tools like PEVerify and Reflector are your closest allies, but this took some head-scratching. I even distilled the code down to two seemingly identical bits of code that read and discard the length of an array variable initialized to null:
The first pane declares “loc 0” and “loc 2” as a local int[] variables; forget about “loc 1” – it is unrelated. The second pane initializes each array variable as a null reference, obtains the length (which is a “native int” which I immediately convert to Int32), and then discards the value.
So why the error? And why one error and not two? PEVerify is, after all, a chatty beast… Either I’ve gone crazy in my code, or somebody is lying to me! Actually, both it turns out.
Pop quiz: what is the difference between these two Type instances representing a 1-dimension array of int:
Type explicitRank = typeof(int).MakeArrayType(1),
implicitRank = typeof(int).MakeArrayType();
The second is our friend, int[]. The first is something different, though; it is a 1-dimensional array of int sure enough, but it isn’t explicitly zero-based! (correction due: see comments) D’oh! It goes by the moniker int[*].
Simply; you can’t use ldlen on an int[*] – only an int[]. What I don’t yet understand is why the upstream code (when it assigned the array “for real”) didn’t complain about the very attempt to assign an int[] value (from a standard “get” accessor) to an int[*] local variable. Presumably the PEVerify authors didn’t think anyone would be stupid enough to try ;-p
The moral here; sometimes it pays to be less explicit (and I don’t just mean the language I used when I found the problem). I’ve also left feedback with Red Gate to tweak how it displays, but to be honest the number of people this cosmetic glitch will affect is minimal.
