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Why aren't reference assemblies resolved from the GAC when running on full .NET Framework?

See original GitHub issue

I have a self-hosted (in a Windows Service) ASP.NET Core website running on full .NET Framework 4.6.1. When it is published and deployed to a machine that doesn’t have the reference assemblies (i.e. C:\Program Files (x86)\Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Framework\.NETFramework\v4.6.1 doesn’t exist) the website responds with:

InvalidOperationException: Can not find reference assembly ‘.NETFramework/v4.6.1/Microsoft.CSharp.dll’ file for package Microsoft.CSharp

My understanding is that these reference assemblies are only for design-time/compile-time support and are installed by tooling (SDKs/Visual Studio) and not by the .NET Framework itself. The publish target has .NET Framework 4.6.1 but doesn’t have the reference assemblies. If I copy the reference assemblies from my development machine to the publish target, everything works.

Is this a bug? Shouldn’t it be trying to resolve the assembly from the GAC?

Issue Analytics

State:
Created 7 years ago
Comments:9 (2 by maintainers)

Top GitHub Comments

2reactions

aL3891commented, Sep 29, 2017

It can go in any top level property group, for example:

<Project Sdk="Microsoft.NET.Sdk.Web">
  <PropertyGroup>
    <BuildForIIS>true</BuildForIIS>
  </PropertyGroup>
...

(it doesn’t have to have its own group though)

1reaction

EtharAlalicommented, Sep 29, 2017

Allan, thanks for this tip. Given the structure of the new VS2017 .NET CSProj files, where in the project file tree should the <BuildForIIS>true</BuildForIIS> go?