registering different versions of a dll through installutil

Question

I am trying to register different versions of a dll for WMI. There are 2 versions of application on the same server which we need to deploy. But the dll which is registered later overwrites the dll which was registered earlier. Can 2 dlls with different versions not be registered on the same machine?

Answer 1

Welcome to DLL Hell:

In COM and other parts of Windows, prior to the introduction of side-by-side Registry-free assemblies, the Registry was used for determining which underlying DLL to use. If a different version of a module was registered, this DLL would be loaded instead of the expected one. This scenario could be caused by conflicting installations that register different versions of the same libraries, in which case the last installation would prevail.