Code Coverage and Strongly Signed Assemblies

I had a problem the other day that stumped me for a while. We just started a new project and immediately dove in to start coding. A few days later, I decided it was time to clean up the code before it got out of hand, so I ran Code Analysis and started cleaning up the problems. One I came across was this on:

System.IO.FileLoadException: Could not load file or assembly ‘xxxxxx’ or one of its dependencies. Strong name validation failed. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x8013141A). File name: ‘xxxxxx’ ---> System.Security.SecurityException: Strong name validation failed. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x8013141A)

This puzzled me, because I had just finished signing the assembly with a strong name. After some Googling, I realized that it was due to the code coverage I had recently configured. After running code coverage, Visual Studio needs to re-sign the assemblies, and there is a separate place to define the key for that re-signing process. To get to it, open up your .testsettings file, go to the "Data and Diagnostics" section, click on "Code Coverage", then click the "Configure" button above.