This post was most recently updated on February 17th, 2019.
Reading Time: 2 minutes.This post describes one nobrainerish fix to the error “An assembly specified in the application dependencies manifest [projectname].deps.json was not found.” I ran into this while running Update-Database for my ASP.NET Core web project, that’s using EntityFrameworkCore 2.1.1.
I hadn’t seen this one before, but the error was quite interesting:
Error:
An assembly specified in the application dependencies manifest (Koskila.[projectname].AzureFunctions.deps.json) was not found:
package: 'Koskila.[projectname].AzureFunctions', version: '1.0.0'
path: 'Koskila.[projectname].AzureFunctions.dll'
Well that’s a weird one coming from an update-database command!

I quickly realized, that the project name in the error didn’t match my web project. That was odd, since I had selected the web project to run my commands against (see red outline in the picture).
![The Update-Database command ran into an error: "An assembly specified in the application dependencies manifest [projectname].deps.json was not found."](https://www.koskila.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/2018-12-30_17-24-421.jpg)
Maybe it really was the dependencies causing the project to be built, the build failing, and that messing up the Update-Database command? After all, if the Azure Functions project did not reference the EntityFrameworkCore package.
Nope – the project would build just fine. It was just the commandlet failing. That’s peculiar..
Solution
Well, this one was fairly straightforward. For whatever reasons, sometimes you do need to specify -ProjectName with the commandlet.
Just selecting the default project in the dropdown and as the startup project is not always enough. I don’t recall having exactly this issue with (non-Core) Entity Framework in the past, so maybe this is something that’s only there in the later versions?
Why? I don’t know, but at least it does make sense to be verbose with your commands, so this isn’t such a drag :)
So, in short, if you get this error with Add-Migration, Update-Migration or Remove-Migration, check these:
- You have selected the right default project in the dropdown in the Package Manager Console (usually your web project)
- You have selected that same project as your startup project in your solution explorer
- If you still get the error, also add -Project or -ProjectName, referencing your web project.
With this, you should be good!
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