I have a project I made in Visual Basic 2008 Express. I converted it from someone else's C# project, but it works. It has several DLL dependencies. I went to publish my project so I can install it on another machine and for each DLL, I get an error: "Assembly must be strong signed in order to be marked as a prerequisite." I've done some research, but am not finding a lot and what I have found I don't really understand. What does this error mean? What is the best way to resolve it? One other thing: it took me a LONG time to be able to get all my dll's to reference correctly, so I prefer that the solution has NOTHING to do with moving DLL's around because that will likely break the functionality in my main project.
If you're publishing via ClickOnce, go to the publish page and click on "Application Files". From there you should see a list of your DLL's. Ensure that the ones that are giving you trouble have their Publish Status marked as "Include" rather than "Prerequisite".
What this error message means is that the current publishing settings are going to expect all of the assemblies in question to be present in the Global Assembly Cache on the target machine before installation can take place. Since all assemblies in the GAC must be strong signed, any assembly marked as a prerequisite that isn't strong signed will give you this error.
The workaround is more simple than that:
Go to your project.
Right click and Select Properties.
Go to the Security Tab.
Uncheck Enable ClickOnce security Settings.
Unless you are deploying this application through ClickOnce, you don't need to StrongName your assemblies.
Strongly named assemblies are mainly assemblies which have are signed by a cryptographic key. This is fairly easy to do with Visual Studio and does not require re-ordering of your dependencies.
I'm using non-express Visual Studio so the steps may be slightly different for you.
Right click on the project and select properties
Click on the Signing tab
Check "Sign the assembly"
In the combo box select "<New...>"
Complete the wizard
Rebuild
Check this link out...it has instructions for signing your assembly with a strong name:
MSDN: Signing an Assembly with a Strong Name
To create a strong name just go to the SDK Command Prompt or Visual Studio 200X Command Prompt then type in the following
sn -k sgKey.snk
Refer this link for details
Then associate the strong name to your assembly by running the below command
al /out:MyAssembly.dll MyOldAssembly.dll /keyfile:sgKey.snk
Refer this link for details
This just worked for me after the above mentioned solutions failed:
Remove the reference to the assembly in error, then add it again.
I found my problem to be in the .csproj file
<Reference Include="OtherProjectNothingToDo">
<HintPath>..\..\..\..\Pedidos\XBAP\Pedidos\Pedidos\bin\Release\Pedidos.exe</HintPath>
</Reference>
Then I removed it using notepad and it is okay now.
Using Adam Robinson's solution allowed me to publish, but I found that users could not install the project once it was published, as the end user system would complain of an inability to install, noting hard drive space. As this seemed highly unlikely to be the root cause, I looked further into it.
Apparently the basis for my problem was that one of my references was also referencing a .dll that my project used, but a different version. ClickOnce was not having this, and refused to copy the second version of the .dll to the user's system, citing the version already present. Fixing it so the .dll and the project referenced the same version of the other .dll removed the error and corrected the install problem.
Check that the Target Framework is actually set to 3.5 or whatever framework you want to target. Sometimes it will error out when it's not set properly.
I just had this problem too. In my case the blabla.dll was referenced in my solution but blabla.dll was also used in another.dll which i had referenced in my project.
On checking the versions of both blabla.dll they were not the same. So i updated another.dll with the correct blabla.dll and then referenced the new another.dll in my solution. The error was gone.
In short: i was using 2 versions of blabla.dll
I hope this makes sense, if not let me know. :)
Check my blog for more detailed explanation:
Blog article
Regards, Jacob Iedema
Related
Please bear with me on this, since I am a Java developer just dipping a toe into the ASP.Net world
I started coding in an existing C# VS2012 codebase. It uses nuget and Newtonsoft is mentioned in the packages.config
When I right-click on Controllers > Add a new controller, I get the following error.
Could not load file or assembly 'nunit.framework, Version=2.2.4.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=...' or one of its dependencies.
The system cannot find the file specified.
Now looking around in Google, it seems the GAC is missing an NUnit assembly. Not sure what I should do about that. Should I get NUnit? Why is it looking for a certain version of nunit (& that too a very old one)?
Any help for me to resolve this problem will be highly appreciated!
When you click "Add new Controller' Visual Studio will try to complete the parse/build to populate a number of values in the window that it is supposed to show you (with the available Models and available Views). It looks like at least one of your projects is missing a dependency (probably your Unit Test project).
NUnit 2.2.4.0 is indeed a pretty old version, it doesn't even exist on NuGet yet (which would have been an easy fix). It makes sense that NUnit is not installed in the GAC, since you normally don't put everything in the GAC just because it seems to be possible. If you're willing to upgrade to the latest NUnit version, the easiest way is to add the NUnit NuGet package to your project through the Package Manager.
I would assume that when you'd open the project file for the project that is generating this warning in Notepad, you'd see a <hintpath> tag as a sibling of the NUnit Reference (it may not be there) which points to the folder where it is telling Visual Studio to look for NUnit.
I suggest you install the NUnit version your project is looking for from here and then update the reference in your project to point to the correct location. That should fix the issue.
As for your remark on the specific version, .NET Assemblies are compiled with a specific version number (usually set in the AssemblyInfo.cs) a reference in a project file can be to a specific version or to any assembly with that name (highlight the reference in the Solution Explorer and check the properties window (ctrl+w,p or alt+enter). You'll see a property "Specific Version" which in your case is set to "true" which caused Visual Studio to store the assembly version in the project file.
Add the code files into a workable solution project.
It is workable for me.
Or, try to create a new Nunit test project with the codes
I also try the following method, but not working for me
Install Nunit, adapter, SDK from the Nuget package
Clean-Rebuild
I'm trying to configure Visual Studio 2012 to allow me to step into ASP.NET MVC 4.0 source code. (System.Web.Mvc.dll). I've followed SymbolSource's recommended configuration but when I try to load the symbols, Visual Studio can't locate them.
Recommended configuration
To configure Visual Studio for symbol/server
use, follow these instructions:
Go to Tools -> Options -> Debugger -> General.
Uncheck “Enable Just My Code (Managed only)”.
Uncheck “Enable .NET Framework source stepping”.
Yes, it is misleading, but if you don't, then Visual Studio will
ignore your custom server order (see further on).
Check “Enable source
server support”.
Uncheck “Require source files to exactly match the
original version”
Go to Tools -> Options -> Debugger -> Symbols.
Select a folder for the local symbol/source cache.
Add symbol servers
under “Symbol file (.pdb) locations”. Pay attention to the correct
order, because some servers may contain symbols for the same binaries:
with or without sources. We recommend the following setup:
http://referencesource.microsoft.com/symbols
http://srv.symbolsource.org/pdb/Public or the authenticated variant
(see above)
http://srv.symbolsource.org/pdb/MyGet or the authenticated
variant (see above) (other symbol servers with sources)
http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols (other symbol servers
without sources)
I am aware that the source code is available on CodePlex, however I'm specifically interested in stepping into the code using a symbol server instead of having to unreference Mvc from the GAC and reference a locally built assembly.
Has anyone had success doing this with MVC 4.0?
Just add a symbol server that serves more then just major releases.
Try this one, contains most minor builds.
http://srv.symbolsource.org/pdb/Public
Verify:
Run VS as administrator.
Check that something have been downloaded to your symbol cache directory.
Goto select only specified modules.
Add "System.Web.Mvc.dll"
Set a break point in your code. Start debug.
When break point hits rightclick in callstack on any mvc.dll row. Verify that symbols are loaded.
if loaded, try dubbleclick on one callstack row to open mvc source.
Get back with where you get in trouble.
I will make some refinements to Luke Gumbley's anwser.
Microsoft tries to make a developer's life easier. Whenever it release an MVC version installer, there should also be a Source to download. So people can use the source to explore what is installed by the Installer, as well as to debug the MVC.
Back to the way of downloading the MVC debug info. Your Visual Studio (I use 2010) will never try to download MVC PDB files from the aforementioned servers if you have MVC4 installed on your system. In this case, your Visual Studio will use the MVC from your GAC when you run debugger.
I have tried the way suggested by Luke Gumbley. However, once you uninstall MVC, your MVC project will not be loaded, and you cannot create a new MVC project since the Template is gone. So please don't unistall MVC. If you do so, you still need to reinstall it. This wastes time.
What you really need to do is exit your Visual Studio, run command
gacutil /u System.Web.Mvc
Then go to C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\assembly\GAC_MSIL, remove or rename the offending System.Web.Mvc folder. After this, lanuch your Visual Studio, and fetch the MVC package from NuGet.
I can't answer on your question directly and provide you URL with symbols (.pdb) for System.Web.Mvc.dll for ASP.NET MVC 4.0, but probably I can help you to solve the problem in another way.
As well known (see here for example) Microsoft provide the current source code of .NET on http://aspnetwebstack.codeplex.com/. In the post it's described how to use the Nightly version of ASP.NET (the current developer state of the code). If you didn't used Git before you can have problems with downloading RTM version of ASP.NET 4.5 (with ASP.NET MVC 4.0) which you could prefer to use instead of Nightly version. Nevertheless the downloading of the full source code of RTM version is easy enough. You need just to know that Git allows to save copy of the code in branches or tagged versions. In the way you can get access (and download it) to some previous versions of the full code. The link for example provide you jQuery 1.8.2 instead of another link get you the latest developer version which can be unstable. So to download the source code of RTM version you just need to choose "v2-rtm" branch and then click on "Download":
You can use the link to select "v2-rtm" branch directly.
I can repeat that it's not exactly what you asked and I know that compiling of ASP.NET source code could be also a little tricky, but I decided do write the information. If somebody would suggest you the better solution it would be interesting for me too.
I had exactly the same issue (correct version but no symbols), but after a day or so of trying everything I've been able to get it working. These are catch-all instructions that worked for me, they may contain unnecessary steps:
Sign up for SymbolSource and follow the VS instructions using the
authenticated URL form
Uninstall all versions of MVC with add/remove programs
Remove MVC assembly from the GAC (the question is about modifying
MVC but the GAC answer is good)
Remove and then reinstall the MVC 4 reference to your project with
NuGet
Start debugging, open the modules window, and cross your fingers
that ‘Symbols loaded’ is next to System.Web.MVC when it appears.
(sprinkle in restarts as you see fit, for me the key final step was reinstalling the NuGet reference)
My theory is that as the GAC library is used at runtime in preference to the local reference, the symbols are not found when they are searched for. By removing MVC from the GAC and then reinstalling the NuGet reference, it seems the local reference is used and the symbols are found. It's counterintuitive as the System.Web.MVC.dll files are binary-equivalent between NuGet and the GAC, although they are dated differently.
I'm not totally convinced though as I tried to do the same thing for Razor and that didn't work.
Let me start with that ReSharper provides a handy dialog to step in the code at any time:
So you get the following code screen if you drill to the source code:
But I became curious to accomplish this by hand. I started with proper pdb configuration:
After that I got the following error:
Next I copied the C:\Users\Andrew\AppData\Local\Temp\SymbolCache\MicrosoftPublicSymbols\System.Web.pdb\CA49C4332DE847FA967F58AFF370B70E1\System.Web.pdb to C:\Users\Andrew\AppData\Local\Temp\SymbolCache\System.Web.pdb (to match the lookup path). After that i encountered this:
And it turned out that the mismatching builds are only good for browsing the source, not debugging. (Current machine has VS2012 RC, hence MVC libraries are not RTM). If they match, you'll the the source.
I still don't know why doesn't the lookup path adjust to symbol configuration. Hope this helps.
I just solved this same problem.
The problem is that the dll stored in the GAC does not correspond exactly to the published pdbs on symbolsource.org. The one on symbolsource corresponds apparently to the latest version available through Nuget, and the one in the GAC must the one installed with .NET Framework 4.5. (.Net uses whatever is on the GAC before attemting to use anything local to your proyect, you can see this, when debuggin, go the Debug->Windows->Modules, there the System.Web.Mvc.dll is the one from GAC according to its path)
What I did was to include in the GAC the System.Web.Mvc.dll on the package folder of my solution, the one downloaded through Nuget. This you can do by using gacutil on a VS Command Prompt (run the VS Cmd as admin).
You can check on the same Modules Windows, right clicking on the System.Web.Mvc.dll, and then on Symbol Load Information. With the "old" GAC dll you get a message like (part of it)
SYMSRV: http://srv.symbolsource.org/pdb/Public/System.Web.Mvc.pdb/1E540B87149F4031B9CDEACAD8D771231/System.Web.Mvc.pdb not found
Notice here the subfolder 1E540B87149F4031B9CDEACAD8D771231 (yours might be different)
After replacing the GAC dll for the one recently downloaded through Nuget, the message is
SYMSRV: System.Web.Mvc.pdb from http://srv.symbolsource.org/pdb/Public: 336067 bytes
http://srv.symbolsource.org/pdb/Public: Symbols downloaded from symbol server.
C:\Users\\AppData\Local\Temp\SymbolCache\System.Web.Mvc.pdb\68B2330E48624B6C9DE05BED1C8C320F1\System.Web.Mvc.pdb: Symbols loaded.
Notice the subfolder 68B2330E48624B6C9DE05BED1C8C320F1, which is the one that is searched for in symbolsource.org is the correctly found.
Hope this helps
There's some related info here: http://aspnetwebstack.codeplex.com/discussions/399312
And here: Debug into nightly build of ASP.NET MVC4 using Symbolserver
I have a seemingly random problem where my project will run using an old version of a DLL file that no longer exists. Sometimes the real version of the DLL file will be used, other times an ancient version of the DLL file will be used. Who knows where Visual Studio is getting this DLL file from - it's months out of date!
I know that it is using the old DLL file, because when the application runs I start getting weird 'TypeLoadExceptions', complaining that methods don't exist or don't have implementations.
The following actions will sometimes help, sometimes not:
Restarting Visual Studio
Restarting the computer
Cleaning and rebuilding the solution
Deleting everything in \WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\Temporary ASP.NET Files
Searching for and deleting instances of the DLL file in \Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Temp
Sometimes I perform all of the above steps, and it still uses an old copy of the DLL file. Where is it hiding it?!
The same issue exists on our TeamCity server which is using MSBuild. When TeamCity tries to run unit tests it uses an old DLL file.
Now, I know that I can use assembly redirection in the web.config file, but the version number of the DLL file hasn't changed (I don't bother to update it, so it just stays at version 1). I don't want to have to start versioning the DLL files just to solve this problem. I would just like to know which particular caches I need to clear so that I can get on with developing.
It hides it in the GAC. There it may reside indefinitely. Using a more recent version may indeed solve the problem, but there is an outstanding bug in Visual Studio that has to do with choosing the correct version of DLL files. (If DLL Hell wasn't bad enough, the Visual Studio team is making it worse!)
Finding it in the GAC is tricky, and I cannot advise you on how to do that, but once the old version is deleted from there, it will not be found again. Sometimes, even though you are pointing the compiler at a newer version (by date), it will use the older version, because it has the same version level (by version). That is its bug.
Who knows where Visual Studio is getting this dll from - it's months
out of date!
The Modules Window is your friend...
It'll tell you exactly where that file is coming from. You can even use it with arbitrary processes if you attach the debugger.
I too would guess that they're hiding in the GAC.
You can look in 'C:\Windows\assembly' to see all the dlls and unregister yours from there.
The problem may exists with the build order or your projects.
If your Test project is built before the application project, this cause the behaviour you describe. To fix this: right click on your main project in VS and select the Project Dependencies... option and check the build order. Changes to the build subsequence can be made here by correctly setting these dependencies.
I had a similiar problem (but without Visual Studio). I am loading a .NET dll using UnsafeLoadFrom.
On one computer (a terminal server) the old file still remains being used, regardless of updated version numbers, etc.
The reason is simple: As long as a program instance is running, which has already loaded the old dll, the new dll will never be used. All further UnsafeLoadFrom will become the old dll although the old version doesn't exist on the harddisk anymore, because it has already loaded some time ago.
The solution is to shut down all running instances of the application or even restart the computer. Then all new instances will get the updated dll.
In my case, this was caused switching to Release mode, which had a different configuration (that used different location of the DLL).
In my case, I use Visual Studio to Publish Website, and though I check the reference of the dll file has changed, but the published dll still is old. Finally I new a Publish Web Profile and choose the right configuration (such as Debug - x86 / Release - Any CPU), publish again then the dll is corrected.
While this question is old, maybe someone will stumble upon it again in his/her quest for finding a solution.
In my case i got a CS0433 error for an ASP.Net page. After deleting the content in the obj\ and bin\ folders of the project, it worked again. Probably has to be done with a closed Visual Studio. Maybe also clean out those folders in referenced projects in the same solution (if used in the project and not pulled via Nuget).
In my case, the old DLL was in
C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\assembly\GAC_MSIL\MyDLL\MyDLL.dll
It DID NOT show up in c:\Windows\assembly.
I did a search of my drive for MyDLL, and it showed up as indicated above. I was debugging my test app at the time, and tried to delete the offending folder...no go...it was locked by Visual Studio. I had to stop debugging my app, close Visual Studio, and then delete the folder. Problem solved!! I don't know how my DLL got there, but it hasn't showed up there since I deleted it.
It's possible that the DLL is being referenced from another folder. It could even be on a network drive if you have one in your PATH environment variable. Here's how Windows searches for DLLs:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/7d83bc18%28v=vs.80%29.aspx
In My Visual Studio 2015, I ensured that the offending Visual Studio project's Reference Path Listing is empty:
If you find such problem ,delete your Reference dll and pdb extensionfile add new references and rebuild your project .This often happens due to no rebuild of project,commit and updates.
The fix for me was making sure that the virtual directory in IIS was pointing to the correct directory. I have two projects on my system, a v4 and a v5. The virtual directory on my dev system was pointing to the v4 bin directory instead of my v5 bin directory - oops!
The file that was being cached in the dll, I couldn't trace the file, so I ended up renaming the file. This might not resolve the problem mentioned here but this was the fix that worked for me related to this question.
I tried a ton of things including re-installing VS 2107.
You can see where the DLL files are being loaded from in your Output window. After going through all mine looking for project DLL, I found it.
Clearing this worked for me.
C:\Users\YourUser\AppData\Local\assembly\dl3\222Q4G1T.8AT\JBEAR7PB.E3J\8bfcf9ab\6e61cbd5_30acd401\YourDLL.dll'
I actually deleted all the files in:
C:\Users\YourUser\AppData\Local\assembly\
Holy Crow! I had an old, old suite of applications including 2 web services and a bunch of class libraries and a click once application. Well, click once stopped publishing for VS 2005 with a bunch of 'not found' errors. So, rather than hack away at my registry as suggested on this site, I figured it was time to upgrade the projects to 2017. Well, when I did this, the projects references in my web service projects got lost. Then, rather than helpfully just telling me that with errors, VS 2017 must have went to some cached file in C:\Users\XXX\AppData\Local\Temp\WebSitePublish or C:\Users\XXX\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\ProjectAssemblies or C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\Temporary ASP.NET Files\root and 'helpfully' just used those files instead! I had to do a hardcore search with a custom program to find all the files on my C:\ drive and delete them before I finally got the errors!
What do you do when you break compatibility on a common library used by many other libraries on your development machine?
What I usually do is:
For every dll that reference the broken one
Checkout dll
Checkout vbp project
Open vpb project with VB6 Ide
Click on References button
Uncheck MISSING reference and OK
Click on References button
Check references and OK
Click on Make dll
Close project
This can be a pita activity, when you have many Dll to recompile and it can be error prone because you could miss some Dll.
I think this problem is more related to development machine; on our staging/production server we have build tools that fix the MISSING problem automatically.
What's your best practice to handle this common scenario on your local machine?
The Way We Work -- section Handle broken references is almost the way we work.
Here is a link to the tool by LJ Johnson -- Take Control of Your Build Cycle. We are using a custom build tools in our daily builds that reads separate REF files.
If you open the vbp with notepad then you should be able to update the reference without actually opening the project. Obviously you'll need to make sure you give it the correct CLSID.
I have added reference to few dlls in my VB.net Project. When I check into Visual source safe and get latest version from another machine, VS.net 2008 throws errors.
I have to add the references again in that new machine. Is there anyway where I can keep the references in spite of files checked in to VSS?
I need to send copy all the files to production server and we don't have VS.net on the production box to add reference and build the application.
Thanks
First, be sure that the project file is checked in properly. Sometimes VS fails to regognize that the project file has changed.
A good practice is to check in all the assemblies that your project references, except the standard .NET libraries.
Another recommendation is to set up a build server, which will detect these kinds of problems early. My personal favourite is TeamCity.
For references that are not in the GAC, and if they are third party things that aren't built elsewhere inhouse, a simple approach is to add the referenced assembly as a solution item (Right click on solution node | Add Existing Item). I usually put solution items in the same folder as the sln and then add the reference to that location.
When you check in the solution solution items will go into source control with it.
Use this for small relatively simple applications. If you have more than a handful of referenced solution items follow #Petter's advice and set up a build server with associated configuration management devoted to third party dependencies etc. etc.