The previous post demonstrated the use of RemoteDependencyWalker to discover all the dependencies of the target libraries. The provided sample will work as expected if versions for all requested packages are perfectly aligned. However, this is not a case in the real life. User’s request may require installation of the conflicting packages and the application should be able to recognize and handle this situation.

With the provided code, application will fail when any conflict will appear. For the problematic packages, meta information will not be resolved, and the resolve result for the associated GraphNode will be null.

The simplest approach to solve the conflicts is to use Analyze() method of GraphNode class. This method returns analysis result which contains information about the issues. There are three types of issues: cycle dependencies, version downgrades and versioning conflicts, and all of them are detected by GraphNode.Analyze().

While the cycle dependencies and versioning conflicts are most likely will lead to the application failure, version downgrades can be handled. Downgrade means presence of the required package with a version lower than a version of one of the resolved packages. In this situation, the dependency resolver adds both packages and marks package with the lower version as a downgraded package. It can be used by the application to decide next action: allow downgrade or fail.