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I've been given a C# project by someone else. I opened the project and tried to install all the Nuget packages by doing a Update-Package -reinstall.

It downloaded all the packages in the packages folder.

/Projects
  /WebApiTest (root folder)
    WebApiTest.csproj
    WebApiTest.sln
    /packages   (packages are loaded in this folder)

But the entire project still says that it's missing all the references. I editted the csproj file to see where it tries to load the packages from, and that is:

  <ItemGroup>
    <Reference Include="Antlr3.Runtime">
      <HintPath>packages\Antlr.3.4.1.9004\lib\Antlr3.Runtime.dll</HintPath>
    </Reference>
    <Reference Include="EntityFramework">
      <HintPath>packages\EntityFramework.6.1.3\lib\net45\EntityFramework.dll</HintPath>
      <Private>True</Private>
    </Reference>
    <Reference Include="EntityFramework.SqlServer">
      <HintPath>packages\EntityFramework.6.1.3\lib\net45\EntityFramework.SqlServer.dll</HintPath>
      <Private>True</Private>
    </Reference>
    ... etc.

So I assume it starts looking in the same directory as the csproj file is in. In that same directory is also the packages folder that has all the DLL files. So the path seems to be right.

Why is my project still not able to load the references?

w00
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  • Do you get any error messages in the Package manager console window or the output window? Before you update the package, please clean and rebuild the whole solution. Please check that if the new version was installed or the old version was really deleted: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20800507/nuget-package-update-issues – Jack Zhai Aug 03 '16 at 10:48
  • Can you share the entire error logs? – Eddie Chen - MSFT Aug 11 '16 at 05:22

4 Answers4

1

This post is starting to get old, but as I have encountered this issue myself and fixed it, I'll share a possible solution.

I had to manually uninstall and re-install the packages by right-clicking on the problematic project, Manage NuGet packages..., then uninstall/reinstall from there.

Be careful on the packages version: be sure to grab the same, in case the project isn't using the latest.

A noticeable effect for me after this procedure is that the paths in the csproj file got updated.

Hope it'll help someone :)

Mateos
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Open up the csproj file for your project in a plain text editor and fix the paths for the DLL's. You may see something like:

<HintPath>packages\etc\etc\etc...</HintPath>

I changed those occurrences to:

<HintPath>..\packages\etc\etc\etc...</HintPath>

I pushed this change from the computer that the project was working fine on and pulled them back down on the bad machine and it was no longer an issue.

Note: This wouldn't be an issue if your project file was in the same folder as your packages folder.

CarCar
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Does NuGet successfully restore the packages from the command line?

Try running this from the command line, from the same folder as your solution:

nuget restore WebApiTest.sln

Note, you may need to fully qualify the execution of nuget (e.g. C:\nuget\nuget.exe), or have it in your path.

You may need to download the NuGet executable, if you haven't already.

If that doesn't work, hopefully it will shed some light on why!

KommandantKeen
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What fixed the missing project references for me was to simply:

  1. Close Visual Studio
  2. Delete the "packages" folder where all the nuget packages are stored (probably at your solution-level or else project-level directory)
  3. Open the solution again in Visual Studio
  4. If you have automatic package restore on, just rebuild, else first restore the nuget packages (from the solution context menu) and then rebuild.
voxoid
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