Error “Metadata file '…\Release\project.dll

Question

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 :(

Answer 1

Had the same problem today.

My application, a Windows Forms applications, accidently had a reference to itself. Weird.

Once removed, the error went away.

The reference got added each time I dragged a user control, located in the Windows Forms project itself, to a form.

Answer 2

I find that this usually occurs to me when i still have a method declaration in an interface, which a class implements, but that i had later removed and had forgotten to remove it from the interface as well. I usually just save the entire solution every 30mins n then just revert back to an earlier version if i cant find the error.

Answer 3

I had the same problem. Manually removing and adding the dlls did not help. ClassLibraries did not compile for all the projects and were missing in the ...\bin\Debug folder for the project [because I cleaned solution by mistake]. Since the class library did not compile that means there may be some errors somewhere in one of those sub projects.

Solution: Since my dlls were there for the ...\bin\Release folder, I tried to rebuild on Release mode and found an error on one line in one of the sub projects. Solving the error and rebuilding the solution got rid off the build error.

Answer 4

Re-open Visual Studio as Administrator.

Answer 5

We recently ran into this issue after upgrading to Office 2010 from Office 2007 - we had to manually change references in our project to version 14 of the Office Interops we use in some projects.

Hope that helps - took us a few days to figure it out.

Answer 6

Did you check the Configuration manager settings? In the project settings dialog top right corner.

Sometimes it happens that between all the release entries a debug entry comes in. If so, the auto dependency created by the dependency graph of the solution gets all confused.