How do I find the physical path for a referenced assembly in Visual Studio?

Question

0.00/5 (No votes)

See more:

Hi,

I have inherited a Visual Studio 2015 solution. A couple of the assembly references are broken, and they are non-standard ones (i.e. they are not in the normal .NET installation).

Before I attempt to fix the references, it would be really useful to know where they currently point. In other words, I want to know where the projects currently expect to find the missing assemblies.

Is there a way to find this out?

Kind wishes ~ Patrick

Posted 26-Nov-15 8:10am

Patrick Skelton

Add a Solution

Comments

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 26-Nov-15 16:11pm

Just look through "References" parts of all the projects, yes, before trying to fix them; what's the problem?
—SA

1 solution

Add a Solution

Add your solution here

Treat my content as plain text, not as HTML

Preview 0

…

Existing Members

Sign in to your account

...or Join us

Download, Vote, Comment, Publish.

Your Email
Password
Forgot your password?

Your Email
This email is in use. Do you need your password?
Optional Password

I have read and agree to the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy
Please subscribe me to the CodeProject newsletters

When answering a question please:

Read the question carefully.
Understand that English isn't everyone's first language so be lenient of bad spelling and grammar.
If a question is poorly phrased then either ask for clarification, ignore it, or edit the question and fix the problem. Insults are not welcome.
Don't tell someone to read the manual. Chances are they have and don't get it. Provide an answer or move on to the next question.

Let's work to help developers, not make them feel stupid.

This content, along with any associated source code and files, is licensed under The Code Project Open License (CPOL)

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov · Accepted Answer · 2015-11-26T10:18:00

Please see my comments to the question.

As I am not sure that the project of that solution even successfully load, I would do it in a simple low-level way: look at each project file, with some text editor, or rename it to "*.XML" and look an any Web browser or XML editor. You will find all references in the elements named <Reference>, child nodes of some <ItemGroup> node. That's a really simple thing.

After you do it and get the references list, you can compare it with what you really have in your GAC. One simple way to review your GAC would be creating an project from scratch and trying "Add Reference". The "Add Reference" window will show you all you currently have. Don't forget that some projects in question may reference other projects of the solution, but this is trivial thing.

—SA