Assembly installed into the GAC not showing up in Visual Studio

Question

This sounds related to this question, but they aren't the same thing. That question had no assemblies showing up. Mine has everything except the specific one I installed.

I'm hoping someone has a solution to this... am I doing something wrong? Or did I find some bug in VS?

I am using Visual Studio 2010 Professional Beta 2 on Windows 7 Ultimate. I just downloaded Rhino Mocks and decided to install it into the GAC using the command-line utility GACUTIL. I then rebooted.

Here you can see the assembly in my GAC (click to enlarge):

And here is the list of assemblies available to me in Visual Studio:

Here is the command prompt where I installed it, and then confirmed it:

C:\Users\jason\Downloads>gacutil -i Rhino.Mocks.dll
Microsoft (R) .NET Global Assembly Cache Utility.  Version 4.0.21006.1
Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation.  All rights reserved.

Assembly successfully added to the cache

C:\Users\jason\Downloads>gacutil /l |grep -i rhino
Rhino.Mocks, Version=3.6.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=0b3305902db7183f, processorArchitecture=MSIL

Answer 1

Visual Studio never lists all items in the GAC. It only lists items that are noted in a particular registry key.

Please see this knowledge base article for more info: How to display an assembly in the "Add Reference" dialog box

You can always add a reference to the assembly by browsing to it on disk.

Answer 2

I've created a tool which is completely free, that will help you to achieve your goal. Muse VSReferences will allow you to add a Global Assembly Cache reference to the project from Add GAC Reference menu item.

Answer 3

The Visual Studio Add Reference dialog is independent of the GAC: the folders it looks in for assemblies is actually controlled by the AssemblyFolders registry key. Not everything that appears in the GAC appears in Add Reference (and conversely not everything in Add Reference is in the GAC).

To add references to the Rhino Mocks DLLs, just go to the Browse tab, navigate to the location where you installed/unzipped/built Rhino Mocks, and select the DLL(s) from there.

Answer 4

You can install the Report Viewer DLLs for both WebForms and WinForms from NuGet:

nuget> Install-Package Microsoft.ReportViewer

Answer 5

Accepted answer didn't resolve this, instructions have changed slightly according to How to: Add or Remove References By Using the Add Reference Dialog Box

For a 32-bit operating system, add one of the following registry keys.

• [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\.NETFramework\VersionMinimum\AssemblyFoldersEx\MyAssemblies]@="AssemblyLocation"
• [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\.NETFramework\VersionMinimum\AssemblyFoldersEx\MyAssemblies]@="AssemblyLocation"

For a 64-bit operating system, add one of the following registry keys in a 32-bit registry hive.

• [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\.NETFramework\VersionMinimum\AssemblyFoldersEx\MyAssemblies]@="AssemblyLocation"
• [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\.NETFramework\ VersionMinimum\AssemblyFoldersEx\MyAssemblies]@="AssemblyLocation"

VersionMinimum is the lowest .NET Framework version that applies. If VersionMinimum is v3.0, folders specified in AssemblyFoldersEx apply to projects that target .NET Framework 3.0 and later.

AssemblyLocation is the directory of the assemblies that you want to appear in the Add Reference dialog box, for example, C:\MyAssemblies.

Creating the registry key under the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE node allows all users to see the assemblies in the specified location in the Add Reference dialog box. Creating the registry key under the HKEY_CURRENT_USER node affects only the setting for the current user.

Open the Add Reference dialog box again. The assemblies should appear on the .NET tab. If they do not, ensure that the assemblies are located in the specified AssemblyLocation directory, restart Visual Studio, and try again.

Tested and working with Visual Studio 2017 Enterprise on Windows 10