Recently I surfaced a problem where, one of my friend had a tough time in getting rid of an assembly reference error. Despite adding reference to
the assembly, while referencing it in code, it was spitting out
the “The type or namespace name ‘ASSEMBLYNAME’ could not be found” error. This was a migration project and owing to
the above error, it was throwing another 100 errors. We tried adding reference to
the assembly in other projects and it was not even resolving
the namespace while typing out in
the using section. Upon further digging into
the error warnings, it indicated something to do with
the .NET Framework targeted i.e. 4.0. My suspicion grew since
the target framework was 4.0 and
the assembly should be able to be recognized. Then, when we checked “Project – “<APPNAME> Properties…”,
the issue was with
the default target framework which is “.NET Framework 4 Client Profile” By default, Visual Studio 2010 creates Windows Forms App/WPF Apps with
the Target Framework set to .NET Framework 4 Client Profile. This is to minimize
the framework size required to be bundled along with
the app. Client Profile is new feature since .NET 3.5 SP1 that allows users to package a minified version of .NET Framework that doesn’t include stuff such as ASP.NET, Server programming assemblies and few other assemblies which are typically never used in
the Desktop Applications. Since
the .NET Framework client profile is a minified version, it doesn’t contain all
the assemblies related to Web services and other deprecated assemblies. However, this application is a migration app and needed some of
the references from Services and hence couldn’t run. Once, we changed
the Target Framework to .NET Framework 4 instead of
the default client profile,
the application compiled. Here is link to a very nice article that explains
the features of .NET Framework 4 client Profile,
the assemblies supported by default etc., http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jgoldb/archive/2010/04/12/what-s-new-in-net-framework-4-client-profile-rtm.aspx Cheers !!
