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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-26T23:48:36+00:00

It seems that starting with .NET 3.0, Microsoft moved some common assemblies to C:\Program

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It seems that starting with .NET 3.0, Microsoft moved some common assemblies to

C:\Program Files\Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Framework\xxx

in order to support their effort to split out the CLR 2.0 and CLR 4.0 GACs (having also added

C:\%windir%\Microsoft.NET\assembly).

However, while I have both

C:\Program Files\Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Framework\xxx

and

C:\Program Files\Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Framework\.NETFramework\v4.0

on my development machine, the latter does not exist on a server where I just installed .NET 4.0. A WCF project being deployed there references some common DLLs from this folder and cannot find them.

What am I doing wrong? Should I change these references to the new 4.0 GAC explicitly? Why does this folder not exist on the server?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Reference Assemblies folder is used with Visual Studio. While the actual deployed application will use the GAC in c:\Windows\Microsoft.Net\Assembly. I am assuming you didn’t install Visual Studio on your server, therefore you wouldn’t have the Reference Assemblies Folder.

    If you hosting WCF on the server, you need to ensure you installed .NET 4.0 Full Framework and not just the client framework.

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