[RESOLVED] Reference Versions

[Shaggy Hiker]

This thread is related to this other one:

https://gitlab.com/ifwis/fisheries/s...g-permit-in-vb

In that other thread I was somewhat misunderstanding what was going on. I'm still not really understanding what is going on, but I am focusing on something different.

I am pulling a project from GitLab from somebody who swears that this is working for them. There are a series of half a dozen references to a third party tool that I don't have. That will be remedied, but it makes sense that those references don't resolve. Following that half dozen references comes all the boilerplate references like System, System.Core, System.Data, and so forth. For all of those, in Project Properties | References, the version number is 0.0.0.0. Naturally, those are not found, because there is no such version for any of them, nor has there ever been one.

Starting a new project with the same framework target, I see version number 4.0.0.0, which works fine. Downloading a different project from the same person, I also see version number 4.0...etc, but for this project, after numerous attempts, the version number is persistently 0.0, which means that the project is unusable since even things like Integer and Boolean are not defined.

So, here are the options:

1) Something is messing up the references for the project. Could it be those six missing references?
2) Something is causing the wrong version to be sought.
3) The whole thing is a red herring and the problem lies elsewhere.

I see that the .proj file holds the references, but not the version number, so the first question I have is: Where does the version number come from?

Another point is that I can't get rid of the bad versions, nor add the correct references, which suggests that the whole thing is, in fact, a red herring, and something else is corrupted, but it isn't anything simple, because this is the third attempt at this same repo, all of which work for the person who created them, and the problem is always the same for me.

[techgnome]

Where does the version number come from?

The proj file... It's been a while but if I remember right, when you create a referenence, there is a way to make it version dependent, or version independent. If it's version dependent, then the version number will be recorded into the proj file along with the rest of the referrence. Otherwise it isn't. I don't think it uses 0.0.0 though, ,I think it simply omits it all together. Is this other person using the same version of VS? Is it possible that some how there is a version independent reference that's been made that's being mis interpreted by VS?

-tg

[Shaggy Hiker]

Turns out, it was a total red herring. There was a reference in the proj file to a different project that no longer existed. Once I edited the proj file to get rid of those invalid references, the rest worked fine.

I really don't see how the two are quite related. There are some odd issues with this. Sure, it couldn't find something it thought it needed, but it didn't quite give up. All the references came after that, so it still processed the rest of the file...mostly, but also did it incorrectly. What's truly odd about the failure is the way that it failed. What a peculiar manifestation stemming from something mostly elsewhere.

[peterst]

You may find interesting this blog post: Binding Redirects

Dependency hell never went away

[Shaggy Hiker]

That might be relevant, tangentially. I'm not quite sure what this dependent project really was or how it got in there. I don't think it was a dll conflict, though. I believe it was a dependent project that had been removed from the solution, but not completely removed such that the dependency remained even though the project did not.