Making System.Data.SQLite Work in an NServiceBus Endpoint

Today a colleague and I worked on getting an an NServiceBus endpoint in a .NET 4.0 project that referenced System.Data.SQLite to work properly. It turns out that this is not as straightforward as it may seem.

The System.Data.SQLite binaries are targeted for the .NET 2.0 runtime. When referencing a .NET 2.0 mixed mode assembly in a .NET 4.0 project, additional configuration is required:


OK, that's fine. But when running an NServiceBus endpoint in the NServiceBus.Host.exe executable, it seems that this setting in App.config does not get applied in the context of NServiceBus.Host.exe. So, to get this to work, we had to turn the NServiceBus endpoint into a console application with a Main method that used reflection to invoke the Main method of NServiceBus.Host.exe. Doing this enables the above setting to be applied in the context of NServiceBus.Host.exe.

It took us the better part of a day to figure this out, so I'm memorializing it here for (my own) future reference.