Visual studio - getting error Metadata file XYZ could not be found after edit continue

Question

I have stumbled into an issue that is really annoying  When I debug my software  everything runs OK  but if I hit a breakpoint and edit the code  when I try to continue running I get an error  Metadata file  XYZ  could not be found  After looking around for a while  I found some a similar issues  but they were all regarding a build failure  which is not my case  this happens only after edit-continue     What I have tried so far    My code is compiling and running  I cleaned the solution and restarted VS  I made sure that the missing file s project is being build for the configuration I am running  in configuration manager   I manually built the missing file s project    Some extra info    It does not matter what I change  still get the same error  the change is not related to the missing file   This happens also when I pause and continue  not only breakpoints  I am running the project using a custom configuration  configuration manager      When I run it using the default Debug configuration the error does not occur    Any ideas

User · Answer

it was happened to me because I ve a strange clash in the namespaces  I had AssemblyA  with namespace AssemblyA ParentNamespace witch defines ClassA and in the same assembly another namespace with name AssemblyA ParentNamespace ChildNamespace witch defines a different ClassA  but with the same name   I had then in AssemblyA ParentNamespace IInterfaceB witch had a method that in the beginning returns IEnumerable and a ClassB witch implements IInterfaceB  I had later modified the method in ClassB to return IEnumerable but I ve forgot to update the IInterfaceB definition  so the method there was still returning IEnumerable the fun fact was that the solution still complile if I did a rebuild all  but the tests witch refers AssemblyA didsn t work and returns the  Metadata file could not be found error   updating InterfaceB to correctly return IEnumerable as its implementor ClassB did solved the problem  unfortunately the error message was vague and also the fact that the compilation worked makes me suppose that maybe there is something to fix in the compiler

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One possible reason could be you have upgraded the some of your projects  in the solution  to higher version e g  from  NET 4 0 to 4 5 This happened in my case when I opened the solution in VS 2013  originally created using VS 2010 and  NET 4 0   When I opened in VS 2013 my C   project got updated to  NET 4 5 and I started to see the problem

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Ensure that there are no spaces in the path to your project    I am using Windows 10 with Visual Studio Community 2019 and I was cloning a multi project solution as it was from a GIT repo  I was having this error with all other dependencies in the solution along with a E POINTER error  Its path  inherited from GIT  had spaces like C  repos MY PROJECT NAME      I deleted it  cloned it again and make sure that its path contained no spaces like C  repos MY PROJECT NAME      That fixed my problem

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Eventually what solved the issue was    Clean every project individually  Right click  Clean   Rebuild every project individually  Right click  Rebuild   Rebuild the startup project    I guess for some reason  just cleaning the solution had a different effect than specifically cleaning every project individually   Edit  As per  maplemale comment  It seems that sometimes removing and re-adding each reference is also required   Update 2019  This question got a lot of traffic in the past  but it seems that since VS 2017 was released  it got much less attention  So another suggestion would be - Update to a newer version of VS     2017  and among other new features this issue will also be solved

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Well  my answer is not just the summary of all the solutions  but it offers more than that   Section  1    In general solutions   I had 4 errors of this kind     metadata file could not be found     along with 1 error saying  Source File Could Not Be Opened     Unspecified error         I tried to get rid of    metadata file could not be found    error  For that  I read many posts  blogs etc and found these solutions may be effective  summarizing them over here    Restart VS and try building again   Go to  Solution Explorer   Right click on Solution  Go to Properties  Go to  Configuration Manager   Check if the checkboxes under  Build  are checked or not  If any or all of them are unchecked  then check them and try building again   If the above solution s  do not work  then follow sequence mentioned in step 2 above  and even if all the checkboxes are checked  uncheck them  check again and try to build again   Build Order and Project Dependencies   Go to  Solution Explorer   Right click on Solution  Go to  Project Dependencies      You will see 2 tabs   Dependencies  and  Build Order   This build order is the one in which solution builds  Check the project dependencies and the build order to verify if some project  say  project1   which is dependent on other  say  project2   is trying to build before that one  project2   This might be the cause for the error   Check the path of the missing  dll   Check the path of the missing  dll  If the path contains space or any other invalid path character  remove it and try building again   If this is the cause  then adjust the build order

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I had this and managed to fix it using this SO answer  Metadata file   39  dll  39  could not be found  I had to uncheck all of the boxes  click Apply  reenable all of the checkboxes and then click apply again  but it fixed the problem

User · Answer

I had same issue too  In my case  I recently add an internal class to somewhere in project  One of the dependencies in solution has same class name and both of them are added correctly to references  I changed my last activity and rebuild  it works  Be sure that your compiler messages are valid  In my case I catch reference error from there  not listed as an error in Error List

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I ve had this problem and it has started after importing our solution to TFS as a new project I came across this topic and found a quick solution with some inspiration from your answers    All i needed to do is to rebuild the project thats supposedly lost its metadata file and voila   problem solved

User · Answer

this happens because of the difference of names in the folder name and namespace name  If u create a namespace in a certain name   and later you rename it the namespace will have the old name itself  And the compilation will take the old path to find the  dll and  exe file   To avoid this open the  csproj file of each namespace with a text file   and find the old path in the file   remove this  clean and rebuild the solution  This worked for me  I spent an entire day working on this problem

User · Answer

It happens when one project dll is failing and that is referenced by number of projects  So first fix it and then Build individuals

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The only thing that worked for me was to delete the Solution User Options   suo  file  Note that  this is a hidden file    To locate this file  close your Virsual studio and search for  suo from the file explorer within your project      PS  a new  suo file will be created again when you rebuild your project and hopefully this newly created one wont give you issues   I hope that helps someone get rid of this anoying error

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My 5 cents    This problem started after a solution wide clean   I managed to get the problem to go away by setting the Active Solution configuration in  Build -  Configuration manager to release  Then build and set it back to debug again  The build succeeded after that

User · Answer

I had this problem for days   I tried all the stuff above  but the problem kept coming back   When this message is shown it can have the meaning of  one or more projects in your solution did not compile cleanly  thus the metadata for the file was never written   But in my case  I didn t see any of the other compiler errors    I kept working at trying to compile each solution manually  and only after getting VS2012 to actually reveal some compiler errors I hadn t seen previously  this problem vanished    I fooled around with build orders  no build orders  referencing debug dlls  which were manually compiled     NOTHING seemed to work  until I found these errors which did not show up when compiling the entire solution       Sometimes  it seems  when compiling  that the compiler will exit on some errors    I ve seen this in the past where after fixing issues  subsequent compiles show NEW errors   I don t know why it happens and it s somewhat rare for me to have these issues   However  when you do have them like this  it s a real pain in trying to find out what s going on   Good Luck

User · Answer

XYZ couldn t be found because is not built yet      Right click on the solution and check Project Dependencies  the Project Build Order should also change according to the dependencies that have been set

User · Answer

I just ran into this issue and after an hour of screwing around realized I had added an aspx file to my product that had the same name as one of my Linq-To-Sql classes  Class and Page where  Queue   Changed the page to QueueMgr aspx and everything built just fine

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A coworker was running into this problem and the cause was eluding us   Eventually we realized that the project directory  and therefore the path to the NuGet packages  contained  20  thanks  some Git gui tool which shall not be named  and the error messages showed that the compiler was looking for an very similar-looking path but one which had to  20  rather a space   Apparently something in the build system somewhere performs HTML-decoding on local filesystem paths   Renamed the working copy directory and everything started working

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Generally this kind of error comes with human mistakes like if we change the namespace in some improper way  or changing folder names from explorer for current project etc  where compiler is unable to detect sometimes   I came across the same error  to resolve which I tried few steps  Please follow all the steps     Clean whole Solution Right Click on every Project in your solution   Go to Properties and make your Default namespace as well as Default assembly name same as in your code  i e namespace before class name  Check Folder names for each project by going through the explorer Where your project solution is   If not matching with your project names  make it similar  Like step 2  to them  Remove all your references from each project relevant to another of same solution  and add it again  In Your Project Solution folder  you will find Visual c  Project file  Right click and open with Notepad  In your initial lines you would find for lines for every project like below    Project   FAE04EC0-301F-11D3-BF4B-00C04F79EFBC         Client        Client       Client   csproj     4503E259-0E3B-414A-9074-F251684322A5   EndProject  Check again Foldernames  I have highlighted in BOLD  and make it similar to what you did in step 2    Clean the whole solution again Build The Solution  If doesn t work try building individual after cleaning again

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For a new build  it could be that some dependencies aren t installed   For me it was Crystal Reports

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I had this error come up  I followed all of the solutions here but nothing worked  I was using Visual Studio 2013 Professional  I couldn t get the individual project rebuilds to work and I finally figured out there was a circular dependency in my references  Visual Studio does a pretty good job normally of warning you if you are adding a reference to something that references back  but for some reason it didn t in this instance  I added a reference to a project that referenced the project I was working on - and it accepted it  VS bug perhaps

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I had the same problem  In my case I had by mistake I had set all the projects apart from the project with the main method as console application   To resolve I went to every project other than the one with main function and right click  properites   output type   class library

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Close VS  locate and remove the  packages  folder from outside of visual studio  Restart VS and build -  all dependencies are reinstalled

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There s also one another silly reason which you should check with patience    as it occurred to me after wasting 4hours searching for answers   The story to me was that I accidentally changed a small line of code among thousands of c  class files and then trying to rebuild the solution   As you could imagine  I ended up with 40  meta data file missing errors and with 1 compilation error among them -- which I didn t check carefully  purely thinking all errors were the same   after 4 hours searching and then accidentally double checking my error list  I found that silly code error  fixed it  compiled  and then error disappeared    Not a good answer to your problem  but do hope my case wasn t same to yours

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Are you using a database code generation tool like SQLMETAL in your project   If so  you may be facing a pluralized to unpluralized transition issue   In my case  I have noted that some old pluralized     table names  upon which SQLMETAL adds  by default  an  s  letter at the end  table references to classes generated by SQLMETAL   Since  I have recently disabled Pluralization of names  after regerating some database related classes  some of them lost their  s  prefix  Therefore  all references to affected table classes became invalid  For this reason  I have several compilation errors like the following       xxxx  does not contain a definition for  TableNames  and no extension method  TableNames  accepting a first argument of type  yyyy  could be found  are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference     As you know  I takes only on error to prevent an assembly from compiling  And that is the missing assemply is linkable to dependent assemblies  causing the original  Metadata file  XYZ  could not be found   After fixing affected class tables references manually to their current names  unpluralized   I was finnaly able to get my project back to life       If option  Visual Studio   Tools menu   Options   Database Tools   O R Designer   Pluralization of names is enabled  some SQLMETALl code generator will add an  s  letter at the end of some generated table classes  although table has no  s  suffix on target database  For further information  please refer to http   msdn microsoft com en-us library bb386987 v vs 110  aspx  Hope it helps

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Visual Studio 2019 Community 16 3 10 I had similar issue with Release build  Debug build was compiling without any issues  Turns out that the problem was caused by OneDrive  Most likely one could experience similar issues with any backed-up drive or cloud service     I cleaned everything as per Avi Turner s great answer     In addition  I manually deleted the  obj Release -folder from my OneDrive folder and also logged to OneDrive with a browser and deleted the folder there also to prevent OneDrive from loading the cloud version back when compiling  After that rebuilt and everything worked as should

User · Answer

I had this issue too   It started after I did a little folder tidying in my project    I then tried to compile and got many duplicate class errors    despite them not being duplicated   I think the linking was just out of wack   Upon checking these  the errors would all disappear leaving only the  Metadata file    debug application exe could not be found  error   I solved this by looking in the build output window to find which classes were duplicated     I would then right click the class name and  go to definition    there will be two definitions to select from  open them both  the second definition will seem to open the same file again  however the second one will identify as the error source red underline     Delete all the code out of the file and save This will not effect your actual file   This should now compile correctly

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Make sure all your dependent projects are using the same  Net Framework version   I had the same issue caused by a dependent project using 4 5 1  while all others were using 4 5   Changing the project from 4 5 1 to 4 5 and rebuilding my solution fixed this issue for me

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As far as I can tell  this happens when the project dependencies gets messed up for whatever reason  whilst all the inter-project references are still intact   For many cases  it is NOT a code issue  And for those who have more than a few projects  going through them one at a time is NOT acceptable   It s easy to reset project dependencies -    Select all projects and right click unload Select all projects and right click reload Rebuild solution   For those who have an issue in their code or some other issue that s causing this problem you ll obviously have to solve that issue first

[c#] Visual studio - getting error "Metadata file 'XYZ' could not be found" after edit continue

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