The other day, one of our customers was switching over to 64-bit development machines, and encountered the following issue:

System.BadImageFormatException: Could not load file or assembly'(assembly name)' or one of its dependencies. An attempt was made to load a program with an incorrect format.

The likely reason is that you (or in this instance, our customer) are trying to load a 32-bit assembly into a 64-bit application. This can happen when you have the Any CPU platform selected.

Solution:

If your scenario sounds like the one I described, try setting your application to run in x86 mode. In Visual Studio this can be done by going to Build -> Configuration Manager…

…and setting the Platform to be x86.

This article and many others like this can be found on my SoftArtisans blog.