What does 'useLegacyV2RuntimeActivationPolicy' do in the .NET 4 config?

Here's an explanation I wrote recently to help with the void of information on this attribute. http://www.marklio.com/marklio/PermaLink,guid,ecc34c3c-be44-4422-86b7-900900e451f9.aspx (Internet Archive Wayback Machine link)

To quote the most relevant bits:

[Installing .NET] v4 is “non-impactful”. It should not change the behavior of existing components when installed.

The useLegacyV2RuntimeActivationPolicy attribute basically lets you say, “I have some dependencies on the legacy shim APIs. Please make them work the way they used to with respect to the chosen runtime.”

Why don’t we make this the default behavior? You might argue that this behavior is more compatible, and makes porting code from previous versions much easier. If you’ll recall, this can’t be the default behavior because it would make installation of v4 impactful, which can break existing apps installed on your machine.

The full post explains this in more detail. At RTM, the MSDN docs on this should be better.

After a bit of time (and more searching), I found this blog entry by Jomo Fisher.

One of the recent problems we’ve seen is that, because of the support for side-by-side runtimes, .NET 4.0 has changed the way that it binds to older mixed-mode assemblies. These assemblies are, for example, those that are compiled from C++\CLI. Currently available DirectX assemblies are mixed mode. If you see a message like this then you know you have run into the issue:

Mixed mode assembly is built against version 'v1.1.4322' of the runtime and cannot be loaded in the 4.0 runtime without additional configuration information.

[Snip]

The good news for applications is that you have the option of falling back to .NET 2.0 era binding for these assemblies by setting an app.config flag like so:

<startup useLegacyV2RuntimeActivationPolicy="true">
  <supportedRuntime version="v4.0"/>
</startup>

So it looks like the way the runtime loads mixed-mode assemblies has changed. I can't find any details about this change, or why it was done. But the useLegacyV2RuntimeActivationPolicy attribute reverts back to CLR 2.0 loading.