How to pull SharePoint 2010 Reference assemblies for dedicated build server

Question

I am trying to build my SP2010 projects on a clean build server. All of my project's are building fine with one exception. One Visual Web Part project fails with the following error on the build server:

System.IO.FileNotFoundException: Could not load file or assembly 'Microsoft.Web.Design.Server, Version=14.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.

Now, I have the SP2010 SDK installed on the build box but obviously this assembly (Microsoft.Web.Design.Server) is not present.

How can I get this needed dependency over to the build server? How can I extract from the GAC and install into GAC on build box? Why didn't MSFT include this assembly into the SDK?

Answer 1

It looks like you can collect assemblies from the dev environment by PowerShell script. And then install them to the build server. You can modify this script to retrieve all needed assemblies.

Answer 2

You can try Alexander's PowerShell link but if you want something really easy and quick which will enable you to get assembly you want from gac then you can try this,

Click start and then on "Run",

Put this command in it,

%windir%\assembly\GAC_MSIL   // you move back a directory it will show you gac as folders which you can copy and that.

If your assembly description says "MSIL" then you can click on this folder "GAC_MSIL" and same for other types of assemblies.

For more information check this link out.

I always use it to backup GAC before doing any deployment on production as otherwise if something breaks, I got right version's of dlls as sometimes retracting solution removes dlls from GAC.