First of all, thanks for the help in advance, and excuse me for my relative lack of knowledge on these subjects, and this long post. I have a strange reference issue I'm trying to work out. I've done many hours of research on this subject, but I think my limited knowledge is holding me back from understanding. I'm losing my mind a bit here.
We are reviewing a project and came across an odd situation where there are references to System.IO and System.Runtime in the original .csproj file for an application (Sitefinity 10.1.6502), but in the copy of the .csproj we have on file post-development they have been removed. There are still references to System.Runtime.Caching and System.Runtime.Serialization in both.
When I looked online and in Sitefinity's public Git example repos, I found that about 1/2 of the examples with code for the same version DO have and like the original file does, and 1/2 DO NOT have them like the file in our repo. Some appear to have those references added at a later time when upgraded versions (to 10.2 or 11).
I also do not see System.Runtime.dll in the current /bin folder, or see it mentioned in web.config. I do not have access to the GAC.
The question is whether these missing references will cause any problems. The project seems to compile properly in VS2017 using the post-development .csproj file we have (without System.IO and System.Runtime)
We believe the project was originally built in VS2015, and found this article that mentions the exact references we're dealing with, so perhaps VS2015 was part of the problem? Unresolved Project References for System.IO, System.Runtime
I understand these are facades and that System.IO is a namespace in System, which is directly references in both .csproj versions, so that should be covered, correct?
The real question is whether the missing in the post-dev .csproj file could cause any issues. Like I mentioned above, the project is compiling without it in VS2017, and the files seem to work fine on a testing server (can navigate the front-end web pages and all functionality works, but we have not been able to test any of the back-end functionality due to it sharing a database with the live environment (out of our control).
Through my research I've seen it mentioned that System.Runtime should get automatically included during tooling/compiling, and that in normal circumstances it does not need to be directly referenced like it is in half the repos we saw. Is this correct?
I worry less about System.IO because it is already included via System, but from what I understand that isn't the case with System.Runtime
Again, thanks so much for helping clear this up for us, we're beginning to go batty trying to figure out if this is an issue we should worry about or not!