“The application has failed to start because its side-by-side configuration is incorrect” error while running console app(.exe)

While running a console app(.exe) by double clicking on it, we faced a weird issue and the exe was not getting executed. We were getting below error message in a pop up window: “The application has failed to start because its side-by-side configuration is incorrect”.

While checking the event log, we found that there was some issue in the config file for the console app.

Checking the config file, we found that starting angle bracket “<” was removed by mistake in one of the line for which content of XML config file was being invalid.

To fix the issue, we did put the missing angle bracket “<” in place and after that we were able to run the exe successfully.

Hope it helps !!