.net 4.0/4.5 Reference Assemblies folder missing

Question

I created a project on my laptop an continued working on it on my pc. But when trying to build the project I encountered several build errors related to missing assemblies. After checking my references on my laptop it showed that they were pointing to my "Reference Assemblies" folder. When checking my PC it quickly turned out that the folders for .net 4.0 and 4.5 were missing.

I could fix the problem by adding several nuget packages to the project and point to them. But i am curios why this difference has occurred.

both computers have visual studio 2010/2012 installed

and the project is an ASP.NET MVC4 web api project.

any thoughts?

Answer 1

OK I found the reason. It turned out that my PC did not have VS2010 installed (anymore), uninstalling VS2010 caused these folders to be deleted. (reproduced on my laptop). So on my laptop it used the references from these folders but when going to my PC they were removed