Visual Studio 2010: Dropped Assembly References Workaround

After adding some references to external assemblies like to NLog or Munq I found out that on some projects Visual Studio 2010 had a tendency to drop the reference to some of these assemblies.

After the usual searching of Google and Stackoverflow I've put together a combination of different solutions that seems to solve this issue.

  • Step 1: Expand your references and bring up the properties-window. Set Specific Version to True:
  • Step 2: Right click on the project and click Untload Project:
  • Step 3: Right click again on the project and click Edit ...csproject.
  • Step 4: Add an XML-element with the name SpecificVersion with the value True beneath the reference in question:
  • Step 5: Right click on the project and click Reload Project.

This works for me so far.

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