.NET has two CLRs 2.0 and 4.0. CLR 2.0 works till .NET framework 3.5. CLR 4.0 works from .NET 4.0 onwards. Its possible that your solution is using a different CLR than your reference assemblies. In your local development environment, you might have both the CLRs and hence you did not faced any problem. However when you moved to deployment environments, they might have a single CLR only and you got this error.