Visual Studio Won't Update Path to New DLL - visual-studio

Running VS 2015. Have a new version of a dll. Have a VB.net solution that uses a DLL provided by a manufacturer. That DLL has been updated. No matter what I do, I can't force VS to see the new reference to the DLL at a new path. Keeps failing the build, saying it can't find the old dll at the old path.
Found this thread:
Old DLL file keeps being used
As suggested in that thread, I've tried searching for it in the GAC (not found), updating the version of the new DLL, deleting all references, etc. Tried using the Modules window, but that only works when running or in break mode, and I can't get there. Tried upgrading to VS19, same result.
The ONLY thing that seems to work is to start a new solution, add all my source files, and then point to the new DLL location. But that's not a tenable solution when this happens regularly.
Any more thoughts?

Please check your .VBPROJ file. There is a good chance you have more than one reference to the same dependency and can either get rid of one, or ensure that all have the same path.

Related

Visual Studio Could not load assembly

I have a C# project using MySql.Data and EntityFramework, and have used the Data Entity Model Wizard to create code based on an existing database. I created the project on a machine running MySql Server 8.0.25 (where I cannot control the installed version), so all my references for MySql packages are also version 8.0.25.
When I moved the project onto my own machine, running MySql Server version 8.0.31, the project successfully builds but has an error message, which Visual Studio says comes from a .edmx file:
Error 4: Could not load file or assembly 'MySql.Data, Version=8.0.31.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=c5687fc88969c44d' or one of its dependencies. The located assembly's manifest definition does not match the assembly reference. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80131040) ... ScheduleModel.edmx 7
The file in question only contains the text "MySql.Data" in one place, and that's an un-versioned reference to "MySql.Data.MySqlClient", on line 7.
Since the project builds and appears to run correctly, I don't know if this error affects anything. Regardless, I would like to understand it and why it happens and ideally make it go away.
Here's what I've learned form searching for an answer and trying to investigate/fix the error:
There are no references to version 8.0.31 anywhere in my project, as using Visual Studio to search the entire project for "8.0.31" found no results.
Answers to others' questions tell me the version number in the error message specifies the version of a file that Visual Studio DID find. (Whereas I would have thought the given version number is the one that it is LOOKING for.)
Several places said that the found version is probably in the GAC. Originally, the error message said MySql.Data.EntityFramework (not just MySql.Data), and I did find MySql.Data.EntityFramework in the GAC. (No idea how it got there.) After removing it, the error message changed to just MySql.Data. However, MySql.Data is not in the GAC, and no MySql.Data.* are still there either.
There's a tool called fuslogvw.exe that supposedly can help with this issue, but I could not get it to work. When I run it, there is nothing in the log. When I click on options, all options are grayed out. The one person's recommended registry edit did not work either. (I tried closing and re-opening Visual Studio after said edit, then re-building.)
Process Monitor tells me that, during the build process, no processes accessed any files that include "MySql.Data" in the name except those under packages/MySql.Data.8.0.25 and the project's output directory; all files are version 8.0.25. This appears to conflict with #1, because how can Visual Studio have found version 8.0.31 if it never accessed any such file?
I tried using bindingRedirect in App.config to redirect from 8.0.31 to 8.0.25, which had no apparent effect.
Cleaning the solution and re-building ends up putting MySql.Data version 8.0.25 back into the output directory, so Visual Studio clearly is finding the correct version.
Deleting the packages folder results in everything being replaced (with the right version, again) but the error message persists. (The rebuild was strangely fast; I'd have thought everything would have to be re-downloaded, but it was too fast to have done that.)
How would I diagnose this issue? What might be causing Visual Studio to look for or to find a version that I cannot find any reference to, or any .dll file for?
I'm using Visual Studio Community 2019, Version 16.11.2.

Installing a C# library in Visual Studio and using it on unity

I'm a bit of a noob on that topic so I'm searching for help. I need to install this library (https://github.com/twcclegg/libphonenumber-csharp) for a unity project where I need to check phone numbers.
But as I always made simple games in unity I really don't know how to do that and I don't really know either what to search to find an answer.
If anyone of you knows how to do it, it will really make my day.
Thank you
Once do a build on a project you want to use in Unity, then find the DLL output from the build. I recommend you do Release Builds, but for now if you are not familiar with Visual Studio just use what you were able to build. If there are multiple directories then you only need one - the best one to use would be any labelled ".NET Standard" which it seems you have a .net standard 2.0 directory.
Go to your Unity project in the Assets folder, and if there isn't already a Plugins folder create one. Then in Assets/Plugins create a folder named whatever you want for the library - in this case PhoneNumber would be fine. So you would have Assets/Plugins/PhoneNumber and you would copy/paste the contents of your NetStandard2 folder there.
In the end you should have Assets/Plugins/PhoneNumber/PhoneNumber.dll
As soon as you have that dll, you can switch back to Unity and see if it worked by checking the Unity Console for any Errors. You might receive errors saying it could not load the DLL. Almost always if it can not load the DLL it is because of missing dependent DLLs - which is why I said to copy the entire folder contents inside the "NetStandard2" folder since it may contain more than just PhoneNumber.dll - it may have it's necessary dependent dlls also.
If not, you can read the error output and hopefully get a clue as to what dependent dlls are missing. You can also expand the Dependencies in Visual Studio.
Typically the DLL failing to be loaded in Unity is because of missing dependent DLLs. Expanding the Dependencies, which is found under the project name in the Solution Explorer window on the right side of Visual Studio, will show you what libraries it requires. Most of what you see under dependencies (if not all) will require a similarly named dll. Under the netstandard2.0 dependency I see System.Collections.Immutable - so you may need a System.Collections.Immutable.dll which should (usually) be in the output folder when you build the project. You would also need that dll in Unity in your PhoneNumber folder along with PhoneNumber.dll

Visual Studio 2010 - Debugging / Build Problems

I am using Visual Studio Professional 2010 and the Team Foundation Server Express (beta). My VS Project (C#.Net / WPF) has been migrated from VS 2008 (without TFS) to VS 2010 (with TFS).
Whenever I apply changes to my code and try to debug my application, I get messages like This breakpoint will not be hit. (in german: Der Haltepunkt wird momentan nicht erreicht. Der Quellcode weist Unterschiede zur Originalversion auf.) and the project is started using the old executable version (the one with the last successful build). No errors occure, the code is OK, but the changes are not applied either.
When I manually cleanup and rebuild my project, everything works quite fine - but there has to be a fix for this issue?
Edit: I just added a new project to my VS solution and checked it in on the TFS Server. Using this new project the problem does not occure. Even when I add the same dependencies I used in the project mentioned above, the debugging and building of the new project works fine without the errors mentioned above.
Maybe this information helps you to lead me to a solution.
It's not clear whether existing answers are not sufficient. I can't know exactly what's causing your problem; but, I can detail some places this potentially comes up.
The first area that I commonly see this is when a project references an assembly directly. You can create a project that creates an assembly. Another project might use that assembly and you can reference by assembly directly (and not add a reference to the "project"). This disconnects VS from really knowing it needs to "build" that referenced assembly first and it will sometimes get out of sync with the debugging symbols (PDB). You can tell if a project has been referenced or an assembly has been referenced in the properties of the reference (expand References in Solution Explorer, right-click a reference, and select Properties). A referenced project will not have a Specific Version property, while an assembly reference will. You can sometimes also tell from Project\Project Dependencies. If you have a reference to an assembly generated by another project but that project isn't a dependency in Project Dependencies, it might be an assembly reference. To fix this, you can usually just delete the reference and add a reference to the project.
I've also find that sometimes breakpoints confuses the debugger. If I have many breakpoints or they've been kicking around a long time, the debugger sometimes does some weird things. If I delete all the existing break points (Debug/Delete all breakpoints) and re-apply them the debugger is usually much happier.
You can find the answer here. The assemblies might be in GAC or a project or some projects need to be rebuild to generate the pdb files again, which are used for debugging. If you don't choose to rebuild it might use the old pdb files.
My guess is that you are putting breaking points somewhere your program can't access them.
Ex:
const int x = 5;
if(this.x == 1)
//do sth <--- breakpoint here
If you are running a mixed mode application (unmanaged native C++ & managed C#), make sure to set Enable unmanaged code debugging in your C# application's Properties window.
You have to rebuild, there isn't an easier way around it.
The program database files (PDB) need to be recreated. You should also have your configuration setting set to debug.
Also the first answer to this question must be of help as well.
This happened to me when I started VS as an admin, and it also happened to me when the project is set to a different architecture than a DLL that I used in this project.

Visual Studio compiles but the exe isn't there

Source code that compiles fine on other peoples environments won't correctly work in my environment. When I do a rebuild the compile occurs but when visual studio goes to move the exe from /obj/debug/{solution} to /debug/{solution} it cannot find the exe in the /obj/debug/{solution}. To make this even more crazy even after I reinstall visual studio it doesn't work. On other people environments it works find. Please note that this is a windows mobile 6, compact framework 3.5 project, Visual C++ project.
EDIT: Visual Studio 2008 is being used.
EDIT2: After looking at the logs again come to find out it says it is compiling but it isn't really compiling. Interesting enough it doesn't throw any errors until it tries to link the code. When it goes to link the object files, they aren't there and it fails.
I got TWO Release folders: one in the solution folder and one in the project folder. The former contains the .exe file, the latter does not.
In the solution properties page, check whether the path you are expecting the exe to be is same as the one specified in Linker -> Output file.
Another obvious mistake could be, check what build configuration you are building. You might be doing a release build and expecting a debug executable file :) I have done this a few times.
Maybe VS creates the exe, and before it tries to move it to the final destination your virus scanner grabs it and removes it, or moves it to a save location.
I just wanted to chime in and ask: have you looked for the *.exe file name from the directories above? What I found in my case was it was writing to the directory right above the /release subdirectory. Not sure how I missed that detail, but I did! I suppose it never occurred to me earlier because I saw the buildlog.htm being written to the /release subdirectory, and the very existence of the directory itself. In my case it was compiling, linking, etc. I just wasn't able to see the *.exe in that /release subdirectory.
There are two subtly different paths. I was looking here, which doesn't exist:
C:\Users\james\source\repos\CppHelloWorld\Release\CppHelloWorld.exe
The actual exe is here - note the path contains the x64 platform that it was built for:
C:\Users\james\source\repos\CppHelloWorld\x64\Release\CppHelloWorld.exe
In general, the path seems to be:
$PROJECT_PATH\$PROJECT_NAME\$PLATFORM\$CONFIGURATION\$PROJECT_NAME.exe
If the exact same solution works on other machines, then it's an environment problem and no amount of looking at the project, linker, etc is going to resolve this. What is different about the environments? Are the same service packs and QFE's applied for not just Studio, but also the OS? Is there a difference in processors (64/32-bit)? Are your permissions the same? Do you have the same SDKs installed?
I'd agree with Shahi that just trying to build a "hello world" app against the same SDK and see if it will compile is valuable info.
I had exactly the same problem. Just close Visual Studio and reopen it again (basically restart it) and it should work.
In my case, my network security team released an unannounced security update that preventing me from creating any .exe files. I figured that out at midday after trying all the solutions (+ more) here.
Perhaps you do not have write permission to the output folder? If you are running on Vista/7, is your Visual Studio running as elevated?
I've found this to be random for myself in now VS2016. My work around has been to just create another project and copy the contents from the one with out the .exe to the new one. For some reason the new one normally will have the proper .exe and location needed. While this isn't a complete solution at least it's been working for me for the time being.
It happened with me today:
TL;DR; You might be using some C# code in your project who belong to a language version which is not supported by the .NET Framework version targeted by your project
Details:
I had two projects in my solution. One project was already existing. I added a new project targeting most recent .NET Framework v4.6.1 supported by Visual Studio(VS) 2017 class library project template. I used some C# language features which is present in C# v7.0. In such a case, VS can compile the project but can't create the output in bin directory.
Eventually I had to merge the new project code files into the existing old project which was targeting .NET Framework v4.5.1.
So I changed the target Framework version to the latest .NET Framework v4.6.1 for the existing projects also. Then the old project also started supporting my newly pasted C# language features.
In my case, the error appeared after I cloned my solution on a new machine.
I did not realise that the newly-cloned solution had AnyCPU set by default, when in reality my solution only supported x64. The compiler, however, did not return any error.
What pointed me in the right direction was the Output log, highlighted that of the 4 projects my solution was composed of, one of them was always skipped, i.e. only 3 were actually compiled. Scrolling up a bit the log, I noticed some message similar to MSIL mismatch between CPU versions.
Switching from AnyCPU to x64 solved the error for me.
(I then deleted the AnyCPU option from the Configuration Manager to avoid this issue in the future)
If you create a new "hello world" WM project, does it work?
If so, you can compare the solution files to check for differences that can cause this.
As far as I could tell, you need to "Save All" before building.

VS2005 loading project references from GAC

I'm using VS2005 (haven't moved to 2008 because I'm still using some legacy tools) and have a question about the way project references work.
If I make a project reference to a project that has been deployed to the GAC, VS will use the assembly in the GAC. This is annoying when I have older code in the GACed assembly and I am making code changes and doing quick tests against them - I have to either GAC the new code every time, or remove the assembly from the GAC so VS can't get it from there.
Is there a way to defeat this behavior?
Can't you just change the reference, pointing to the DLL directly?
Better yet, if you changing your DLL, use the Project as reference instead of the GAC DLL?
The best way around this is a two step proces.
1.) In your GAC'ed DLL upgrade the minor version number. (1.0 to 1.1)
2.) Update the project reference to copy local, and use the new version number.
This "SHOULD" get it working, but with the GAC it isn't always 100%.
You could go the route of a policy file, to stop the GAC from loading....but that gets way more complex.
Copy the reference locally.

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