Visual Studio 2019 Project Dependency with Yellow Icon

Question

I have two brand new C# .NET Standard libraries. They each have a project reference to an older .NET 3.5 Framework library. Only one of the two have a yellow icon on the reference.

Everything builds and runs fine but the triangle still exists, why?

Answer 1

I would hope they have a better way to report reference issues than an unlabeled yellow icon.

Not sure if it's your real question. But you can check the Error List window to get details about why yellow icon displays on the References.

Everything builds and runs fine.

For some scenario, the build in VS can succeed although some build warnings occurs. And it will only fail when some build errors exist.

I add reference to ForTest.dll in my project, this assembly is missing or not compatible with current project, then it displays yellow icon in References. Now since in my project, it doesn't call functions from the ForTest.dll, so it won't exactly affect my build process. Then the project builds successfully and runs fine.

I have tried looking at the build log, in detailed mode, for an error message, but cannot find anything obvious.

When building a solution with several projects, and set the log in Detailed mode, it's easier to get lost in the hundreds of build logs. Since the yellow icon only displays for one project, you can right-click the project=>rebuild to build the project, it makes the message in build log more clear.

Or just use the Error List window as I suggest above to check the warnings and errors instead of hundreds of logs during Trouble-shooting.

In addition: If you can't find any info in Error List window, then maybe the reason why the yellow icon occurs is because VS didn't load the project well. Please try right-click the project=> unload and reload the project in solution explorer. If it persists,close all vs instance and delete the .vs folder in solution directory, and restart vs.