SQLCLR assembly owners and dependencies

I was demonstrating SQLCLR appdomain usage (see previous post) to a class last week.Later on, I mentioned a different concept, that of dependent assemblies. This brought up the following question:

If user A owns assembly A and B owns assembly B, what happens if B contains a routine that calls A? Are two versions of assembly A available, owned by different owners? Or does this situation produce an error at CREATE ASSEMBLY time? Or at runtime?

The answer is that CREATE ASSEMBLY fails for assembly B, but with a fairly surprising error. The error is:

Msg 6218, Level 16, State 2, Line 1
CREATE ASSEMBLY for assembly 'Depends1' failed because assembly 'B' failed verification.  Run peverify on the assembly to determine the cause of failure.

Of course, running PEVERIFY on B works correctly, the error indicates that the dependent assembly 'A' could not be loaded into 'B's appdomain. This causes CREATE ASSEMBLY to fail.

It appears that you cannot work around this even by cataloging multiple versions of the assembly A, one version owned by A and the other owned by B. Even if there are multiple versions of the assembly in the database, SQLCLR only attempts to load the version that is cataloged so that the SQL Server name matches the name in the assembly manifest. As an example, even if I create assembly A owned by B and name it A1, attempting to catalog B fails with message 6218 above.

So if assembly A calls a method in assembly B, A and B must have the same owner.

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