Microsoft.Web.Infrastructure was not found while building on CI server.

May 21, 2015

tl;dr story:

Just add HintPath node to Microsoft.Web.Infrastructure Reference node that points to where NuGet package is.

The full story:

I just would like to share with you problem I ran into. Basically we have a ASP.NET project that I updated with some NuGet packages. One of these packages installed as dependency Microsoft.Web.Infrastructure library. As usually, everything worked on my machine (dev box with VS 2013 and all other goods).

But the build failed on our CI server. With error like this (since we run German language mutation of Windows server, msbuild.exe was also in German) : console build error

So, I checked if the package is installed correctly and it was :

mswebinfa package installed

Folder in packages subfolder was present :

mswebinfa subfolder in packages

I looked where the reference is pointing to and it was strange :

mswebinfa wrong path

it should point to packages folder like this :

antlr path in packages

OK, time to check the .csproj file.

Antlr reference looked like this :

antlr csproj reference

however Microsoft.Web.Infrastructure entry was missing the HintPath node, so I fixed it like this :

infrastructure fixed csproj reference

and after loading full solution, stuff started to work again :

mswebinfa correct path

and here we can see happy msbuild.exe in its natural habitat :

console build happy

Hope this helps.

BTW similar (but different) problem was solved here : http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13149851/could-not-load-file-or-assembly-microsoft-web-infrastructure

Hope this helps.


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Written by Dušan Roštár - the "mr edge case" guy
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