Assembly's dependent Assemblies are not copied

Question

I have a scenario where i have library say for example : SomeLibrary.dll which references to System.Net.Http and System.Net.Http.Formatting just an example with Copy Local flag true, and that assembly is actually consuming some types of these two dlls.

Then i create a new Project and i add reference to SomeLibrary.dll with Copy Local flag true, when use methods of this dll which are internally using the above 2 libraries, the runtime error comes saying:

Could not load file or assembly 'System.Net.Http.Formatting, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.

What i was expecting was it should have dependent assemblies on which SomeLibrary.dll depends should also be in the bin folder copied, which is not happening.

Am i missing something here?

UPDATE:

For your information, i am able to make it work by adding reference seperateely to those 2 dlls but wondering why i need to add seperately if i have reference to SomeLibrary.dll which is dependent on those 2 dlls.

System.Net.Http and System.Net.Http.Formatting are referenced in the new project? — Arturo Menchaca, Apr 06 '16 at 16:48
no they are not they are only referenced in other library which i have referenced in my main project — Ehsan Sajjad, Apr 06 '16 at 16:59
Are you using any type of System.Net.Http or System.Net.Http.Formatting directly in SomeLibrary, or is used by another one referenced library? — Arturo Menchaca, Apr 06 '16 at 17:24
This is not supposed to happen. You'll have to show us the detailed build trace. — Hans Passant, Apr 06 '16 at 18:51
Does this answer your question? [MSBuild doesn't copy references (DLL files) if using project dependencies in solution](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1132243/msbuild-doesnt-copy-references-dll-files-if-using-project-dependencies-in-sol) — StayOnTarget, Feb 23 '21 at 15:09

score 1 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:01

I just had a very similar sounding problem, where I had assembly A depending on assembly B, and B depended on System.Net.Http.Formatting.dll. For some reason on my build server it wasn't copying System.Net.Http.Formatting.dll so it was missing in the final package it created (though in my case it wasn't in either projects' output folder). It worked fine locally on my development machine and I verified the assembly existing in the same place on the build server as it did on my machine (C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft ASP.NET\ASP.NET MVC 4\Assemblies).

I worked-around the problem with this answer to the related question, which was to switch to using the Microsoft.AspNet.WebApi.Client NuGet package to pull in that assembly explicitly. Unfortunately I'm still not sure what the problem was.

Assembly's dependent Assemblies are not copied

UPDATE:

1 Answers1