C# – “This assembly is built by a runtime newer than the currently loaded runtime and cannot be loaded”

Since Enum Type implements IConvertible interface, a better implementation should be something like this:

public T GetEnumFromString<T>(string value) where T : struct, IConvertible
{
   if (!typeof(T).IsEnum) 
   {
      throw new ArgumentException("T must be an enumerated type");
   }

   //...
}

This will still permit passing of value types implementing IConvertible. The chances are rare though.

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.