Issues running program in Visual Studio Code

Question

I'm attempting to run a WinExe with <UseWPF>true</UseWPF>, but it is not even running a simple Hello World program. I'm not sure what's wrong at this point, the only clue is this inner exception.

An unhandled exception of type 'System.BadImageFormatException' occurred in CSharpProgram.dll: 'Could not load file or assembly 'PresentationFramework, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35'. Reference assemblies cannot be loaded for execution. (0x80131058)'

Here is my .csproj file:

<Project Sdk="Microsoft.NET.Sdk">

  <PropertyGroup>
    <OutputType>WinExe</OutputType>
    <TargetFramework>net7.0-windows</TargetFramework>
    <ImplicitUsings>enable</ImplicitUsings>
    <Nullable>enable</Nullable>
    <UseWPF>true</UseWPF>
  </PropertyGroup>
</Project>

Here is the program:

using System;

public class Program
{
    public static void Main() {
        Console.WriteLine("Hello World!");
    }
}

Any help is greatly appreciated.

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 23 '23 at 18:41

I'm not familiar with Visual Studio Code, so the following isn't an answer for how to create a WPF Application in VS Code, but if desired, one can create a WPF Application using dotnet new .

Download/install the .NET SDK
Open a cmd window

To see installed SDKs:

dotnet --info

To create a new WPF Application:

dotnet new wpf --framework <TargetFramework> --output <fully-qualified path> (ex: dotnet new wpf --framework net7.0 --output "C:\Temp\WpfAppTest\WpfAppTest")

see TargetFramework

To Build/Run Application:

dotnet run --project "C:\Temp\WpfAppTest\WpfAppTest\WpfAppTest.csproj"

Use your favorite editor to develop/modify the WPF Application (you may consider using Visual Studio).

Creating a new WPF Application worked for me. Thanks for the help! — ToyKid22, Apr 24 '23 at 21:15

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 23 '23 at 17:42

From MSDN:

The UseWPF property controls whether or not to include references to WPF libraries. This also alters the MSBuild pipeline to correctly process a WPF project and related files. The default value is false. Set the UseWPF property to true to enable WPF support. You can only target the Windows platform when this property is enabled.

When this property is set to true, .NET 5+ projects will automatically import the .NET Desktop SDK.

So in behind, the compiler is automatically looking for WPF libraries and .NET Desktop SDK. You can try:

Confirm if all the dependencies are installed (do you have all parts for that SDK)? Go to Visual Studio installer and check/add necessary parts
Try to reference those projects/dependencies directly. Do you have all of them available and installed? If so, you could try to reference them directly from the project to make sure they are properly picked up.

When you create default WPF application without any changes, it looks like this (have those dependencies):

Issues running program in Visual Studio Code

2 Answers2