Error "Metadata file '...\Release\project.dll' could not be found in Visual Studio"
debugging, release, resolveassemblyreference, visual-studio
Solution
Everyone is correct...try everything...(in order of a little to a lot of time wasted)
- Do you have bad code? Fix that first.
- Clean Solution & Restart Visual Studio
- Remove / Add References
- Check your build order w/ larger projects and verify
- Manually rebuild sub-projects
- Manually copy dlls between projects into associated bin folders
- Go get some coffee, play some pinball and come back tomorrow...you may think of something else in the meanwhile.
Problem
Recently I started to get this message randomly: Metadata file '...\Release\project.dll' could not be found in Visual Studio I have a solution with several projects in it. The current build mode is Debug and all projects' configurations are set to Debug. But when I try to run the main project - sometimes it gives me a few errors, all of which are "Metadata file '...\Release\projectX.dll' could not be found" - and, look, it says about RELEASE folder, though current mode is Debug. Why? I tried to search for reference to "Release\projectX.dll" inside all solution files, and I found one in ResolveAssemblyReference.cache file. I made a good search over the Internet and found a few people with a similar problem, but there was no solution, or at least no working solution. I tried to delete references to those projects and read them, but in some time I start getting these errors again. It seems like a bug. Why does it search for referenced projects in Release folders when I always use Debug mode? PS. For those who met this problem: I couldn't solve it in an easy way. It disappeared only after I reinstalled Windows :(