Scaffold-DbContext throws error "Could not find assembly" in .net core

Question

I am using .net core and entity framework core 1.1.0. while trying the following command in Package Manager Console

Scaffold-DbContext "Server=MyServer\\MyInstance;Database=MyDB;user=MyUsername;password=MyDbPassword;" Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.SqlServer -OutputDir Models -t Table1,Table2

I am getting this error

Could not find assembly 'D:\Work\Projects\src\MyProject\src\MyProject.Api.\bin\Debug\net461\win7-x64\MyProject.Data.exe'.

MyProject.Data is a net core library. MyProject.Api is a .net full framework core api, which references the MyProject.Data.

project.json file of MyProject.Data

{
  "version": "1.0.0-*",

  "dependencies": {
    "Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.Design": "1.1.0",
    "Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.SqlServer": "1.1.0",
    "Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.SqlServer.Design": "1.1.0",
    "Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.Tools": "1.1.0-preview4-final"
  },

  "frameworks": {
    "net461": {}
  }
}

Any advice for me?

You may want to try using the .NET Command Line tools: dotnet ef dbcontext scaffold ... — bricelam

Sateesh Pagolu Sateesh Pagolu · Accepted Answer · 2016-12-30T04:04:22

Not sure if this is a bug, but scaffold-dbcontext command looks for the assembly in Startup Project.

There are two workarounds for this issue

Right click on the project you intend to run this command on (in your case, it is MyProject.Data) and select Set as startup project.
You can pass a parameter to scaffold-DBContext command to set a particular project as startup project while running the command. This is what you need to add at the end of command...

-StartupProject MyProject.Data

Scaffold-DbContext throws error "Could not find assembly" in .net core

2 Answers