SQL Server Troubleshooting: Could not load file or assembly Microsoft.MSXML…

I’m not programming anymore as I used to do, though from time to time I still fancy some .Net programming. It’s not much, small applications or CLR-based libraries for SQL Server. Quite often, when I return to programming after a long pause it happens that I run into problems, finding that something that was working previously stopped working. During my last attempt I couldn’t load anymore one of the projects I worked on, receiving the following error:

“Could not load file or assembly ‘Microsoft.MSXML, Version=8.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a’ or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.”

Same happened when I tried to load other projects. I looked then into GAC in “C:\Windows\assembly” folder and saw no reference to Microsoft.MSXML dll. So I tried to install the msxml6.dll assembly in GAC however, never doing that, I run into another problem. In the meantime I tried to install the Visual Studio 2010 SP1, the MSXML 6.0 and even the Windows .Net SDK. All this without success. After several good hours, I returned to one of the forum posts (here) I run into in a first place. Thomas Sun was pointing that it might be a problem with the Microsoft Document Explorer 20xx. The solution was to reinstall it from  “C:\Program Files\Common Files\microsoft shared\Help 9\Microsoft Document Explorer 2008”. Once I did that everything was back to normal. At least until I’ll run into another issue.

After all this there is still one positive point: I managed to install SP1 and all the goodies it comes with, and I’m thinking here at the support for HMTL5. The downside – several good hours of lost time! I don’t want to think how much time I lost until now trying to solve things that were supposed to work in a first place – probably weeks, months…  That’s part of programmers’ life.

Disclaimer:
As Microsoft changed the whole structure of their support websites, most of the resources become unavailable. Therefore I had to remove the links pointing to the various sources.