Knowledgebase

When I wanted to add a project reference in Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, I was getting a “This dependency cannot be added because it will create a circular dependency” error message, but I was 100% sure this reference would not cause a circular dependency.

Solution

I solved this problem by unloading the project in Microsoft Visual Studio, opened the *.csproj file in notepad.exe and added the project reference manually and reloaded the project.

<ProjectReference Include="..\MyProject2\MyProject2.csproj">
      <Project>{CD01F694-7705-4FE2-9610-D33C88862BE1}</Project>
      <Name>MyProject2</Name>
    </ProjectReference>

The GUID can be found by opening the MyTest2.csproj and searching for the <ProjectGuid> tag.