Visual Studio "The referenced project '{<IDENTITY>}' does not exist"

Question

I have seen a few threads about this Visual Studio (2010) warning before. But none of them seem to show the project's identity like I am getting. (I'm assuming this is the project identifier.) When I compile my project I get:

c:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\Microsoft.Common.Targets(1422,5): warning : The referenced project '{5BED5853-86EB-BA4F-A6E2-25A211A18E33}' does not exist.

Further, I can't seem to find which project this is referring too. In my project's properties > Common Properties > Framework and References, none of the references have project identifiers that match what the warning is showing.

So my question is, how can I determine what project reference is causing this, and how should I go about fixing it?

Answer 1

This issue was caused by a Visual Studio 2008 to Visual Studio 2010 conversion error. In the original solution, there was a project that had a broken reference. This reference was a project that was long ago removed, but apparently no errors/warnings were given in MSVC 08. When converting the project to MSVC 10, this broken reference was converted as well. Since the reference was broken, the path to the reference project was set as the project identifier, hence why I was only seeing the project identifier in the warning message.

To fix this, I had to edit the .vcxproj project file and manually remove the broken reference. You can't fix this through Visual Studio because the converted project will never show the broken project as a reference.

Finding it in the .vcxproj file is easy, just search for the project identifier (in this case 5BED5853-86EB-BA4F-A6E2-25A211A18E33) and remove the entire <ProjectReference> tag referring to it.

Answer 2

1. Check the .csproj file and ensure the paths to other ProjectReferences are correct.
2. Make sure that there are no warnings or unresolved symbols under the project's 'Dependancies' node in the tree view.

If you still have problems, your build would appear to be stale.

• This occurs because the ${project}/obj/project.assets.json contains invalid information.
• This file within the intermediate folder contains invalid paths.
• The entire folder is autogenerated.

For SDK MSBuild project files, you can restore this by doing the following:

View => Other Windows => Package Manager Console

> cd <root project folder>
> rmdir obj     # Confirm [A] Yes to All
> dotnet restore

Now do a rebuild on your project.