Referenced DLL not copied - c#

I have a project (call it A, it's an exe) which references another project (call it B, it's a class library) which references a dll (call it C). When debugging A.exe from visual studio I get a run time error:
An unhandled exception of type 'System.IO.FileNotFoundException' occurred in B.dll. Additional information: Could not load file or assembly 'C', Version=0.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.
When I go to my executing bin\debug directory, sure enough, C.dll isn't there.
I've explicitly called classes in C.dll from B.dll, so there isn't any weird run time adding of references or reflection being used to call it. I've also set "Copy Local" to true on C.dll. If I reference C.dll from A.exe directly, then it runs with no problem, but I'd rather not have to do that.
I've tried to repro the problem in a new solution, but I've been unable to.
Does anyone know what might be preventing this dll from copying to the final output directory?

The best thing you can do is have the projects A, B, and C all in one Visual Studio Solution, then you can reference the other projects that you need without referencing the dlls.
Once you have that, then add a Project Reference like this:
project B references project C
project A references project B
Because you are then referencing the projects, it will pull the necessary dlls along for the ride when you compile the whole thing.
However, as neo said, if you keep C as a dll, then A will have to reference it as well, because VS is not smart enough to copy it as well.

I've encountered similar problems so I'd recommend to try these things:
Toggle "copy local" to "false" and then to "true" again, it should resolve the problem, if the problem is missing
< Private > True < /Private > node in project file
Check Target Framework of your project, I'have similar problem with several projects targeted "4.0 framework" and other "4.0 client profile", after switching to "4.0" on every project was resolved

Ok finally got it...I think.
It looks like the C project didn't have any version information under Application-->Assembly Information. It was also missing a guid.
For the record: You CAN reference the way I described (A refs B which refs C) and have the output copied. I did go back to a dll reference rather than a project reference and it still worked after a clean and build.
I'm still not sure why I was able to get this to work in a new solution (before making changes), but I'm up and running now.
Edit:
One other note, it looks like there was no assembly.cs in the project (which is why it didn't have any version info). I wonder if it was just a recompile of this project that could have fixed it rather than updating the assembly info.

Related

How to customly resolve Assembly version conflict

CIn our .NET application we have project A that reference an infrastructural project, let's call it Infra. Now, project A also references project B, which resides in a different solution, referencing another version of the Infra. The top level application, project C, references project A.
While this compiles just fine, it has another side effect - it does not copy the Infra.dll to the bin folder of project C.
I increased the verbosity of the build output, to see what exactly is the problem, and saw this:
There was a conflict between "Infra, Version=1.1.14.9..." and "Infra,
Version=1.0.0.0 ...". "Infra, Version=1.1.14.9" was chosen because it
had a higher version.
That actually makes a lot of sense, having 2 conflicting references to the same version should try to get the higher version. The problem is that B project's reference to Infra is not an accessible path and therefore will not be copied.
I could surly solve this issue by adding a reference form project C directly to infra, but I would prefer not to. I was wondering whether I could tell the compiler explicitly which version to use.
Any ideas?

The type is defined in an assembly that is not referenced, how to find the cause?

I know the error message is common and there are plenty of questions on SO about this error, but no solutions have helped me so far, so I decided to ask the question. Difference to most of similar questions is me using App_Code directory.
Error message:
CS0012: The type 'Project.Rights.OperationsProvider' is defined in an
assembly that is not referenced. You must add a reference to assembly
'Project.Rights, version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null'.
Source File:
c:\inetpub\wwwroot\Test\Website\App_Code\Company\Project\BusinessLogic\Manager.cs
Following suggestions here and here, I have deleted all instances of Project.Rights.dll inside C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET/*.*
According to this, I checked if .cs files in question have build action set to "Compile". They do.
I have also double checked that the .cs file containing the "Project.Rights.OperationsProvider" type is deployed to App_Code directory.
For some reason, application is not looking for the type in the App_Code directory. Since I've deleted all instances of Project.Rights.dll (that I know of), I don't know which assembly the error message is mentioning.
When you get this error it isn't always obvious what is going on, but as the error says - you are missing a reference. Take the following line of code as an example:
MyObjectType a = new MyObjectType("parameter");
It looks simple enough and you probably have referenced "MyObjectType" correctly. But lets say one of the overloads for the "MyObjectType" constructor takes a type that you don't have referenced. For example there is an overload defined as:
public MyObjectType(TypeFromOtherAssembly parameter) {
// ... normal constructor code ...
}
That is at least one case where you will get this error. So, look for this type of pattern where you have referenced the type but not all the types of the properties or method parameters that are possible for functions being called on that type.
Hopefully this at least gets you going in the right direction!
Check target framework in the projects.
In my case "You must add a reference to assembly" actually meant, that caller and reference projects didn't have the same target framework. The caller project had .Net 4.5 , but referenced library had target 4.6.1.
I am sure, that MS compiler can be smarter and log more meaningful error message. I've added a suggestion to https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn/issues/14756
In my case this was because doing a NuGet package update had only updated references to a dll dependency in some but not all projects in my solution - resulting in conflicting versions. Using a grep-style tool to search text within *.csproj files in my solution it was then easy to see the projects that still needed to be updated.
When you get this error, it means that code you are using makes a reference to a type that is in an assembly, but the assembly is not part of your project so it can't use it.
Deleting Project.Rights.dll is the opposite of what you want. You need to make sure your project can reference the assembly. So it must either be placed in the Global Assembly Cache or your web application's ~/Bin directory.
Edit-If you don't want to use the assembly, then deleting it is not the proper solution either. Instead, you must remove all references to it in your code. Since the assembly isn't directly needed by code you've written, but instead by something else you're referencing, you'll have to replace that referenced assembly with something that doesn't have Project.Rights.dll as a dependency.
In my case, I was referencing a library that was being built to the wrong Platform/Configuration (I had just created the referenced library).
Furthermore, I was unable to fix the problem in Visual Studio Configuration Manager -- unable to switch and create new Platforms and Configurations for this library. I fixed it by correcting the entries in the ProjectConfigurationPlatforms section of the .sln file for that project. All its permutations were set to Debug|Any CPU (I'm not sure how I did that). I overwrote the entries for the broken project with the ones for a working project and changed the GUID for each entry.
Entries for functioning project
{9E93345C-7A51-4E9A-ACB0-DAAB8F1A1267}.Release|x64.ActiveCfg = Release|x64
{9E93345C-7A51-4E9A-ACB0-DAAB8F1A1267}.Release|x64.Build.0 = Release|x64
Entries for corrupted project
{94562215-903C-47F3-BF64-8B90EF43FD27}.Release|x64.ActiveCfg = Debug|Any CPU
{94562215-903C-47F3-BF64-8B90EF43FD27}.Release|x64.Build.0 = Debug|Any CPU
Corrupted entries now fixed
{94562215-903C-47F3-BF64-8B90EF43FD27}.Release|x64.ActiveCfg = Release|x64
{94562215-903C-47F3-BF64-8B90EF43FD27}.Release|x64.Build.0 = Release|x64
I hope this helps someone.
It just happened to me that different projects were referencing different copies of the same dll.
I made sure all referenced the same file on disk, and the error disappeared as I expected.
Unloading and reloading the class library in Visual Studio solved this for me.
For me, this was caused by the project both directly and indirectly (through another dependency) referencing two different builds of Bouncy Castle that had different assembly names. One of the Bouncy Castle builds was the NuGet package, the other one was a debug build of the source downloaded from GitHub. Both were nominally version 1.8.1, but the project settings of the GitHub code set the assembly name to BouncyCastle whereas the NuGet package had the assembly name BouncyCastle.Crypto. Changing the project settings, thus aligning the assembly names, fixed the problem.
It didn't work for me when I've tried to add the reference from the .NET Assemblies tab.
It worked, though, when I've added the reference with BROWSE to C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319
I had this issue on a newly created solution that used existing projects. For some reason, one project could not "see" one other project, even though it had the same reference as every other project, and the referenced project was also building. I suspect that it was failing to detect something having to do with multiple target frameworks, because it was building in one framework but not the other.
Cleaning and rebuilding didn't work, and restarting VS didn't work.
What ended up working was opening a "Developer Command Prompt for VS 2019" and then issuing a msbuild MySolution.sln command. This completed successfully, and afterwards VS started building successfully also.
one of main reason can be the property of DLL
you must before do any thing to check the specific version property if it true make it false
Reason:
maybe the source code joined with other (old)version when you build it , but this Library upgraded with new update the version now different in the Assembly Cash and your application forbidden to get new DLL ,and after disable specific version property your applacaten will be free to get the new version of DLL references
Maybe a library (DLL file) you are using requires another library. In my case, I referenced a library that contained a database entity model - but I forgot to reference the entity framework library.
This can also mean you use a library, which exposes (public) types that are defined in a library. Even when you do not use these specifically in your library (the one that doesn't build).
What this probably prevents is you writing code that uses a class (which in its signature has the types from a library not referenced) that you cannot use.
For me the reason why the error appeared was that the WebForm where the error was reported has been moved from another folder, but the name of its codefile class remained unchanged and didn't correspond to the actual path.
Initial state:
Original file path: /Folder1/Subfolder1/MyWebForm.aspx.cs
Original codefile class name: Folder1_Subfolder1_MyWebForm
After the file was moved:
File path: /Folder1/MyWebForm.aspx.cs
Codefile class name (unchanged, with the error shown): Folder1_Subfolder1_MyWebForm
The solution:
Rename your codefile class Folder1_Subfolder1_MyWebForm
to one corresponding with the new path: Folder1_MyWebForm
All at once - problem solved, no errors reporting..
The type 'Domain.tblUser' is defined in an assembly that is not
referenced. You must add a reference to assembly 'Domain,
Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null'.
**Solved:**
Add reference of my domain library layer to my web app libary layer
Note: Make sure your references are correct according to you DI container
In my case this was because I used
Implicit Operator
between BLL and DAL classes.when I want to use BLL Layer In Application Layer I got this error.
I changed
implicit operator
to
explicit operator
it be OK.
Thanks
In my case the version of the dll referenced was actually newer than the one that I had before.
I just needed to roll back to the previous release and that fixed it.
I have a similar problem, and I remove the RuntimeFrameworkVersion, and the problem was fixed.
Try to remove 1.1.1 or
My problem was that the Output Type for one of my projects was set to Console Application. To fix this, I right-clicked the project, chose Properties, clicked the Application tab, and change Output Type (from Console Application) to Class Library. After I re-compiled, this error went away.
Clean your solution and rebuild worked for me (in Visual Studio, these are options you get when you right click in your solution explorer), the error is gone in my project.

Outdated Project Assembly loaded when running in Experimental Instance

I have two C# projects, A and B, in VisualStudio 2010. Project A is a class library. Project B is a ReSharper-Plugin project that references project A (ProjectReference). Both projects compile and worked property when I ran project A in the Experimental Instance.
Now, recently I renamed a static class, with some extension methods, in project A. Both projects still compile. But when I run project B I get an TypeLoadException for the new class name. When I change the class's name back, everything works fine again.
My guess is that project B is compiled against the new code, but run against an outdated dll. I tried everything from clear, over rebuild, to restart, but to no avail. I also manually checked that a fresh dll from project A is placed in project B's bin/Debug folder, which is the case. And I copied over the dll manually, after building project A. The problem persists.
Now I ask myself whether there is another location where the dlls are copied to before running the Experimental Instance. Is this the case? If so, where to? Are there any other places where the old version could come form? Or is there even something completely different that could cause the problem?
Thanks in advance!
Ok. Did you reference the DLL or the Project? In a Visual Studio Solution you can reference projects. If you reference project A in project B then B should always use the latest code from project A.
I managed to figure it out myself, thanks to the right keywords on Google (MissingMethodException and ProjectReference) that led me to a blogpost about a solution to the same symptom. In my case it was not the GAC that caused the problem, but the cached assemblies under
C:\Users\{name}\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0Exp\
This is the location where all the assemblies of the Experimental Instance go. Here lay an outdated VsExtension that depended on project A and within it there was an outdated copy of project A that was loaded. The loading of the new version from the project reference was simply skipped, since a copy of the assembly (with the same version) was already loaded.
So the problem was ultimately caused by the removal of the extension from my solution. From this point of the extension was no longer updated by VS, but it was also not removed! Lessons learned: After major changes of your infrastructure you may want to delete all cached assemblies below the above path...
Thanks for the help, everyone!

C# type defined in an assembly that is not referenced

I have two projects A and B. Project A makes use of type X in project B, so I have a reference to B added in A. Everything built fine.
I signed project B using a strong named key file. Everything still built fine.
Then I decided to change the strong named key file for B. I rebuilt project B ok. When I try to build project A I receive the error "Error 1 The type X is defined in an assembly that is not referenced. You must add a reference to assembly B, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=95b41b0d6571627b'. "
So I deleted the reference in project A and added it back in again, no joy. I can dbl click on the project B reference in project A, open the object browser and see type X in there ok. I also fully qualified the type X objects in A and the intellisense picked them up fine but it still does not build.
I thought that changing the key file I might need to up the revision, so I changed assembly B version to 2.0.0.0 but still A complains that it needs version 1.0.0.0. Looking at the properties of the B reference in A it definitely points to the correct version and indeed it shows as 2.0.0.0
I could live with using the existing key file but i'd like to understand where I am going wrong if possible.
Based on what you said in the comments, I would say it's most definitely something up with Project A.
Perhaps these steps will help fix it:
Remove the reference to project B and save
Crack open the .csproj file with notepad or something
Look for any references to Project B in there (maybe a hintpath node) and remove the node.
If Project A happens to be an ASP.NET project, look in your web.config or your aspx page headers for any references to Project B.
Once you remove all references to the project, reload the project as bottlenecked suggested and see if that fixes it for you.
Sorry for late answer, but this helped me:
(Assuming that you have AnyCPU solution platform currently)
switch solution platform to x86.
compile
switch back
compile again.
What worked for me was to remove the reference to the project, then add it back in again. A new error message appeared stating that I needed a reference to a third library that was missing, so the original message was a bit misleading!
This also happened to me.
In my case, the problem was that from a solution A I was referencing projects from a solution B (I changed the name of a project from B). When I tried to compile A, it tried to find the old name of the project in B.
I added again the new reference of this project, recompile and so on but unhopefully it did not work.
The problem was fixed when I added again all the reference of B in A. I was loading old DLLs that were compiled with the old project of B. These DLLs had some kind of cross interaction with the old reference.
I hope this work for someone else.
You could try editing the project A's project file (projectA.csproj). To do this through visual studio right click on the project->unload project and then on the unloaded project right click->edit file. Search for the reference to project B in there, and try to correct as necessary
To help people getting here from Google, Merlyn's comment asking about delay-signed was the answer for me.
I was getting this error referencing a delay-signed assembly A that referenced a type X defined in assembly B. I got the error that B wasn't referenced (and I was already referencing the signed version of B).
The fix was to find and reference the signed version of A.
if x inherites A you must refrence it in B

How to set "Specific Version" property for project references in Visual Studio

I have got a Visual Studio Solution containing several projects and have set up the references between the projects as project references.
When a reference to an assembly is added, the references' properties contain a setting for
Specific Version = True|False
This property is missing for project references. How can it be set? I'd like my solution to load any available assembly (no matter what version) in the bin folder.
I've had a problem when a workflow instance (Workflow Foundation) was deserialized and the dependencies were updated meanwhile.
I think the problem is that what you are asking is not possible directly with a project reference, I think that always implicitly turns into an 'explicit version', because of the nature of the link.
The way you could do this (calling the currently referenced project A, and the referencing project B):
Have the project you want to reference in your solution, just like you do now with the project reference
Explicitly set the dependency chain so the 'referenced' project is built first
Build the referenced project A once first manually
Create an assembly reference in project B to the results from the build in project A
Set the assembly reference to 'Specific Version = false'
The build order (dependency) will guarantee that A is always built before B, and B will reference it from the binary output directory of A.
(altho, it's a little brittle and I would not recommend it since it's easy to get wrong results if the settings are not all right, or the sun aligns with the stars wrong, or some such)
I might be misunderstanding your question, but when you add a project reference, the project's assembly is always loaded into any project that references it when the project is built. Therefore, you'll always have the latest available assembly in the bin folder for that project. VS treats projects differently than other assemblies in that regard.
You can add references to project output dlls instead of projects. Then you will be able to set Specific Version setting.
I have found the solution to my problem. It's described pretty detailed here.
The problem is not a matter of wrong project references, but more a de/serializing of workflow instances question.
Thanks to everybody who tried to help.

Categories

Resources