I pulled a collaborative project off of GitLab (essentially GitHub, but not as well known). The project is a ASP.NET project using Web Forms, but that may not be relevant to the question. The problem I'm seeing is that the project loads, yet EVERY reference is "not found". That includes all the boilerplate Framework references like System, which means that types like Boolean and Integer are not defined. There are other oddities, too, which suggests that some file is missing. For example, if I go into Project Properties, I should see the project name, as is shown in Solution Explorer. I'm not quite sure how to make it such that the application name and the project name are not the same, but for this downloaded project, they are not. The project name showing in Project Properties is WebApplication1, the default name. That default name doesn't show up if you create a blank project with any name other than the default name, but I don't know how this project was created. It may be that it started with the default name, then the name was changed in other places, but not wherever Project Properties takes data from.
I have some other projects that occasionally lose track of references, though only references to dlls that I created, and only when I rebuild those dlls. In those cases, I remove the reference and re-add it and all is well. That doesn't work for the references in this project. I can remove them, but when I re-add them, some are stated as being already present, while others just show up with the same "not found" yellow triangle.
I've never seen anything like this, and am not sure what to look at. As a test, I created a similar project as a test, and all the references were there and working, so I don't believe it's an installation problem. Two other points is that there is a NuGet package that is not being included, even though it should be an automatic download. Manually including it doesn't seem to do anything, as the error doesn't go away. The other point is that the solution includes two projects, one of which was not on the GitLab repo, so I'm missing a project. That may well account for a couple of the missing references, but it doesn't seem like it should account for the missing references to the boilerplate items.
Any suggestions?
I have some other projects that occasionally lose track of references, though only references to dlls that I created, and only when I rebuild those dlls. In those cases, I remove the reference and re-add it and all is well. That doesn't work for the references in this project. I can remove them, but when I re-add them, some are stated as being already present, while others just show up with the same "not found" yellow triangle.
I've never seen anything like this, and am not sure what to look at. As a test, I created a similar project as a test, and all the references were there and working, so I don't believe it's an installation problem. Two other points is that there is a NuGet package that is not being included, even though it should be an automatic download. Manually including it doesn't seem to do anything, as the error doesn't go away. The other point is that the solution includes two projects, one of which was not on the GitLab repo, so I'm missing a project. That may well account for a couple of the missing references, but it doesn't seem like it should account for the missing references to the boilerplate items.
Any suggestions?