Why Can't Visual Studio Find My Dll

Why can't Visual Studio find my DLL?

Specifying the path to the DLL file in your project's settings does not ensure that your application will find the DLL at run-time. You only told Visual Studio how to find the files it needs. That has nothing to do with how the program finds what it needs, once built.

Placing the DLL file into the same folder as the executable is by far the simplest solution. That's the default search path for dependencies, so you won't need to do anything special if you go that route.

To avoid having to do this manually each time, you can create a Post-Build Event for your project that will automatically copy the DLL into the appropriate directory after a build completes.

Alternatively, you could deploy the DLL to the Windows side-by-side cache, and add a manifest to your application that specifies the location.

visual studio c++ project cannot find .dll

The linker settings have nothing to do with finding DLL files at run-time. If you want this SDK to be available to all programs - which without reason to do otherwise would be my recommendation - hit the start button and search for "environment", choosing "Edit environment variables for your account". Edit the value of the PATH environment variable (adding it if necessary) to include the directories where the DLLs are located.

If you only want it to be available to this particualr program (and you don't have any other custom DLLs that need to be found) you could also change the startup directory in the project properties to the directory where the DLL files can be found (the startup directory is one of the locations in the system search path).

Referenced DLL in VisualStudio can't find its own DLL C#

What you need is to check "copy to output directory", "always copy" in the properties of your DLL in VS.
Otherwise the DLL is not automatically copied in the output, and the program can not run.

I think this other question might help you: MSBuild doesn't copy references (DLL files) if using project dependencies in solution

How do I set the path to a DLL file in Visual Studio?

1. Go to project properties (Alt+F7)
2. Under Debugging, look to the right
3. There's an Environment field.
4. Add your relative path there (relative to vcproj folder) i.e. ..\some-framework\lib by appending PATH=%PATH%;$(ProjectDir)\some-framework\lib or prepending to the path PATH=C:\some-framework\lib;%PATH%
5. Hit F5 (debug) again and it should work.

Metadata file '.dll' could not be found

I just had the same problem. Visual Studio isn't building the project that's being referenced.

Written Instructions:

1. Right click on the solution and click Properties.
2. Click Configuration on the left.
3. Make sure the check box under "Build" for the project it can't find is checked. If it is already checked, uncheck, hit apply and check the boxes again.
4. (Optional) You had to do it for both Release and Debug modes on the solution properties.

Screen capture Instructions:

• They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Click on the GIF to zoom in, and hopefully it will be easy to follow:

Visual Studio 2012 refuses to find referenced .dll

I am not sure why this eventually solved it, but I t noticed that the date on MyMainWebService.dll (the project that references project.dll) was outdated. I manually deleted this .dll along with the version of project.dll that was out there. I then built the solution and it found the correct version of project.dll. (It also built the correct date of MyMainWebservice.dll).

What baffles me is why didn't doing a "Clean" remove the outdated version of MyMainWebService.dll?

Missing .dll in different Visual Studio versions

I think you need to find the VS2015 redistributable on Google and install it on your machine. That should solve it.

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