VS 2017 Metadata file dll could not be found

Question

I know there is another question with exact the same problem  but I went trough all those answers  and none helped me      This was the question    I just created a new ASP NET MVC project and joined a few   dll s in the solution  Now when I try to build the project I get the error message shown below on 3 of the 5 libraries   Error   CS0006  Metadata file  C  Users     source Database bin Debug DataAccessLayer dll  could not be found   Logic   C  Users     source Logic CSC   1   Active  Error   CS0006  Metadata file  C  Users     source Logic bin Debug Logic dll  could not be found    PTS2-MVC    C  Users     source PTS2-MVC CSC    1   Active  Error   CS0006  Metadata file  C  Users     source PTS2-MVC bin PTS2-MVC dll  could not be found    PTS2-MVC Tests  C  Users     source PTS2-MVC Tests CSC  1   Active   When I go to the bin debug folder of that  dll  I see that it is empty  and the other  dll where I do not get an error message  is not empty  But I am clueless how to fix this or what I did to make this happen   The most common answer is to go to the properties of the solution and go to configuration and uncheck -  apply -  check and apply again  but that didn t work

User · Answer

I had the same problem  even with no other errors showing on the  Error List  view after  Rebuild Solution   However  on the  Output  view  I saw the error that was behind the issue   The primary reference  C     myproj dll  could not be resolved because it was built against the   NETFramework Version v4 6 1  framework  This is a higher version than the currently targeted framework   NETFramework Version v4 5   Once I corrected this  the issue was resolved

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After facing so many troubles  here is the solution that I found    open your project folder  find Your Project Name csproj Visual C  Project file   csproj   open that file in any text editor and find your missing file ItemGroup    lt ItemGroup gt   lt None Include         gt   lt  ItemGroup gt  remove that ItemGroup and open once again your project and build If that reference is important for you then add once again

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In my case I run the tests and got error CS0006  It turned out that I run tests in Release mode  Switch to Debug mode fixed this error

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I had 2 files  and 2 classes  in the same project with the same name

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In my case  I had to open the  csproj file and add the reference by hand  like this  Microsoft Extensions Identity Stores dll was missing     lt Reference Include  Microsoft Extensions Identity Stores  gt     lt HintPath gt             Program Files dotnet sdk NuGetFallbackFolder microsoft extensions identity stores 2 0 1 lib netstandard2 0 Microsoft Extensions Identity Stores dll lt  HintPath gt   lt  Reference gt

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Close Visual Studio  find the solution s  suo file  delete it  reopen Visual Studio

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In my case the issue was  I was referencing a project where I commented out all the  cs files   For example ProjectApp references ProjectUtility  In ProjectUtility I only had 1  cs file  I wasn t using it anymore so I commented out the whole file  In ProjectApp I wasn t calling any of the code from ProjectUtility  but I had using ProjectUtility  in one of the ProjectApp  cs files  The only error I got from the compiler was the CS0006 error   I uncommented the  cs file in ProjectUtility and the error went away  So I m not sure if having no code in a project causes the compiler to create an invalid assembly or not generate the DLL at all  The fix for me was to just remove the reference to ProjectUtility rather than commenting all the code   In case you were wondering why I commented all the code from the referenced project instead of removing the reference  I did it because I was testing something and didn t want to modify the ProjectApp csproj file

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I have build 10 projects out of 25 projects in solution individually one by one based on dependencies  Then build the solution  It fixed for me

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I fix this problem following this steps    Clean Solution Close Visual Studio Deleting  bin from the project directory Restart Visual Studio Rebuild Solution

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I had the same problem and i tried solutions from  Metadata file   39  dll  39  could not be found  but none of these worked   So after trial and error i fixed it by unloading and reloading the project doing this reset the configuration file and fixed the issue

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What worked for me   Package Manager Console  Visual Studio 2019 Comunity    Install-Package NuGet CommandLine nuget locals all -clear   Rebuild solution

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Running this command in bash to delete all bins worked for me    find   -iname  bin  -o -iname  obj    xargs rm -rf   Can t guarantee it ll work for anyone else though  Also be aware it ll delete all bin files -so you will have to rebuild all projects  Obviously best to cd into the relevant directory before using it

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Cleaning my solution caused this problem with Visual Studio 2017   Unloading reloading projects or more cleaning made no difference   Only thing that worked was closing and restarting Visual Studio

User · Answer

I had this same error   In my case I had built a library  call it commsLibrary  that referenced other libraries by including them as projects in my solution  Later  when I built a project and added my commsLibrary  whenever I would build I got the metadata file cannot be found error   So I added the libraries that my comms library referenced to the current project  then it was able to build

User · Answer

In my case I was facing same error  One of my project solution was referring an assembly from different NuGet location  I just changed it to correct location to solve this error and rebuild  and wow the project get build successfully and all other error gone away

User · Answer

In my case  there was an error  but it was not properly parsed out by VS and shown in the  Error List  window  To find it  you much view the ol  Output  from build window and parse through the messages starting from top down and resolve the actual error  M   please fix  This is a huge waste of time of the worlds collective developers

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For me what worked was   Uninstall and then reinstall the referenced Nuget package that has the error

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I had the same issue  My problem was someone else on the team moved a class folder  and the project was looking for it    For me  there were 44 errors  43 ended in  dll  searching for a dependency  and the first one in the error list ended with  cs  searching for the actual class   I tried clean-build  and clean  unload  reload  build  but nothing working  I ended up locating the class in the project  and just deleted it  as it was showing up as unavailable anyways  followed by a clean-build   That did the trick for me  Hope this helps

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Another thing that you should check is the Target Framework of any referenced projects to make sure that the calling project is using the same or later version of the framework   I had this issue  I tried all of the previously suggested answers and then on a hunch checked the frameworks  One of projects being referenced was targeting 4 6 1 when the calling project was only 4 5 2

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I have the same problem  the problem was that solution path have spaces in the name and vs for some reason not resolve the package    download my repository again just renaming the solution with out spaces in the name   e g     Repo Project Name src   should be    Repo ProjectName src

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This issue happens when you renamed your solution and the  net framework cannot find the old solution    To resolve this  you need to find and replace the old name of solution and all dependencies on it with the new name  If you need to browse the physical file through file explorer do so    The files that are normally affected are AssemblyInfo cs   sln an Properties  gt  Application  gt  Assembly name and Default namespace  Make sure to update them with the new name   Open the file explorer  if the folder with the old name still exists  you need to delete it  Then clean and build the solution until the error is gone   If needed clean and build the project one by one especially the affected project

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Steps in Fixing this Error  MetaData File  dll could not be found    Clean All Projects  Unload All Projects  Reload All Projects  ReBuild Solution    Then problem solved

User · Answer

In my case  I deleted one file directly from team explorer git menu which was causing this problem  When I checked solution explorer it was still showing the deleted file as unreferenced file  When I removed that file from solution explorer  I was able to build project successfully

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The problem was that I had some other normal error messages in my project  and apparently after I fixed those and when I cleaned and built my project AGAIN  then all  dlls succeeded   Make sure you don t have any other error messages in your project and if you do  fix those first

User · Answer

Double check the name of your project folder  In my case my project folder was named with spaces in it  When I cloned the project from Team Foundation Server using git bash the spaces in the folder name were converted to    20   Changing those back to spaces fixed the problem for me

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I had this issue with a solution containing multiple projects   It came from duplicating a  csproj and adding the copy to the solution  A  csproj file contains a  lt ProjectGuid gt  element  I set the GUID of the copied project to a new one   Update  Which GUID you use doesn t matter  it just needs to be different from the other project s GUID  You can create a new GUID from within Visual Studio  Tools - gt  Create GUID and copy the part between the curly brackets  i e         Use that as the new value for the  lt ProjectGuid gt  element   I also performed the following steps  not neccessarily neccessary  but they don t hurt     Close the solution Delete bin folder Delete all obj folders Open solution and build

User · Answer

Check all the projects are loaded  In my case one of the project was unloaded and reloading the project clears the errors

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For me cleaning and building didn t work  Unloading the project didn t work  Restarting Visual Studio or even the pc didn t work  This is what did work   Go to each of the projects that are throwing the error  and in References  delete the reference to the problematic project and add it again  That solves the issue   The problem seems to be related to moving a project around  Move it inside a folder for example   then a different project that references it  have its path wrong and can t find it

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After working through a couple of issues in dependent projects  like the accepted answer says  I was still getting this error  I could see the file did indeed exist at the location it was looking in  but for some reason Visual Studio would not recognize it  Rebuilding the solution would clear all dependent projects and then would not rebuild them  but building individually would generate the  dll s  I used msbuild  lt project-name gt  csproj in the developer PowerShell terminal in Visual Studio  meaning to get some more detailed debugging information--but it built for me instead  Try using msbuild against persistant build errors  you can use the --verbosity   option to get more output  as outlined in the docs

[c#] VS 2017 Metadata file '.dll could not be found

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