Common compilation error for SharePoint 2010 VS projects

This post is a quick public service announcement for a beta 2 issue which I think a lot of SharePoint developers are about to hit. I can’t take any credit whatsoever for the fix, I’m simply playing the messenger here – purely because I notice that whilst the information is in the public domain now, search engine users will probably not find it. Since I’ve hit this a few times already (including when writing code for my Managed Metadata demo), I figure it’s worthy of more attention.

The extremely useful SharePoint 2010 Beta Release Known Issues post over on the SharePoint Developer Documentation Team Blog has the info in one of the ‘development issues’ points:

• Some assemblies, such as Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing, appear in some cases to have a dependency on an incorrect version of the System.Web.DataVisualization assembly. The incorrect reference causes build failures. If you see this problem, add a reference to the correct version of System.Web.DataVisualization on your system. If you installation is on the C drive, that assembly will be located here:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft  Chart Controls\Assemblies\System.Web.DataVisualization.dll

To expand on this, this is a known bug which causes a design-time only error, since the correct version will be loaded by .Net at runtime – so it will stop you compiling, but once you’ve got past that you’re good. When I hit the issue the fix above didn’t seem to work for me, but an alternative fix of adding this path into a specific registry key did – however, when I went back to test again adding the reference did solve my problem, so I’m assuming I did something wrong first time. Certainly this approach is far preferable to editing the registry on every dev VM you have, so I won’t publish those details.

At least the following assemblies seem to be affected:

• Microsoft.Office.Server.Search
• Microsoft.SharePoint.Taxonomy
• Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing

I tried using NDepend to generate a full list, but for some reason the trial version isn’t finding dependencies which I think exist. In any case, if you discover additional assemblies with this issue, please leave a comment.

Finally, to help folks searching for this on the interweb here are some of the errors you’re probably searching on:

The primary reference "Microsoft.Office.Server.Search, Version=14.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c, processorArchitecture=MSIL" could not be resolved because it has an indirect dependency on the framework assembly "System.Web.DataVisualization, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" which could not be resolved in the currently targeted framework. ".NETFramework,Version=v3.5". To resolve this problem, either remove the reference "Microsoft.Office.Server.Search, Version=14.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c, processorArchitecture=MSIL" or retarget your application to a framework version which contains "System.Web.DataVisualization, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35"

The primary reference "Microsoft.SharePoint.Taxonomy, Version=14.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c, processorArchitecture=MSIL" could not be resolved because it has an indirect dependency on the framework assembly "System.Web.DataVisualization, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" which could not be resolved in the currently targeted framework. ".NETFramework,Version=v3.5". To resolve this problem, either remove the reference "Microsoft.SharePoint.Taxonomy, Version=14.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c, processorArchitecture=MSIL" or retarget your application to a framework version which contains "System.Web.DataVisualization, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35"

The primary reference "Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing, Version=14.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c, processorArchitecture=MSIL" could not be resolved because it has an indirect dependency on the framework assembly "System.Web.DataVisualization, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" which could not be resolved in the currently targeted framework. ".NETFramework,Version=v3.5". To resolve this problem, either remove the reference "Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing, Version=14.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c, processorArchitecture=MSIL" or retarget your application to a framework version which contains "System.Web.DataVisualization, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35"

Again, thank the guys behind the SharePoint Developer Documentation Team Blog and the Product Group folks for this info, not me.