Why "Method not found: 'Void System.Web.Http.HttpResponseException..ctor" after package update?

Question

I have an ASP.NET MVC application which started to misbehave after the last NuGet package updates. The web app uses .NET Framework 4.6.1, and the developer machine is a Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials. One package I use is Stripe.NET for payment processing. Its earlier versions required only <package id="System.Net.Http" version="4.0.0" targetFramework="net461" />. Visual Studio marked that there's a newer version of that (at that time it was 4.3.0), but when I updated that it pulled in a ton of packages. So I simply reverted back that dependency to 4.0.0, Stripe didn't require newer.

Then lately I introduced Nager.Date to handle work days and holidays. The latest update (v 1.5.0) of that package requires "NETStandard.Library" version="1.6.1". Just like upgrading System.Net.Http to 4.3.0, upgrading to that Nager.Date pulls in the ton of packages I mention. In summary: sooner or later I have to cave in and update.

The pulled-in packages:

<package id="Microsoft.NETCore.Platforms" version="1.1.0" targetFramework="net461" />
<package id="Microsoft.Win32.Primitives" version="4.3.0" targetFramework="net461" />
<package id="System.AppContext" version="4.3.0" targetFramework="net461" />
<package id="System.Collections" version="4.3.0" targetFramework="net461" />
<package id="System.Collections.Concurrent" version="4.3.0" targetFramework="net461" />
<package id="System.Console" version="4.3.0" targetFramework="net461" />
<package id="System.Diagnostics.Debug" version="4.3.0" targetFramework="net461" />
<package id="System.Diagnostics.DiagnosticSource" version="4.3.0" targetFramework="net461" />
<package id="System.Diagnostics.Tools" version="4.3.0" targetFramework="net461" />
<package id="System.Diagnostics.Tracing" version="4.3.0" targetFramework="net461" />
<package id="System.Globalization" version="4.3.0" targetFramework="net461" />
<package id="System.Globalization.Calendars" version="4.3.0" targetFramework="net461" />
<package id="System.IO" version="4.3.0" targetFramework="net461" />
<package id="System.IO.Compression" version="4.3.0" targetFramework="net461" />
<package id="System.IO.Compression.ZipFile" version="4.3.0" targetFramework="net461" />
<package id="System.IO.FileSystem" version="4.3.0" targetFramework="net461" />
<package id="System.IO.FileSystem.Primitives" version="4.3.0" targetFramework="net461" />
<package id="System.Linq" version="4.3.0" targetFramework="net461" />
<package id="System.Linq.Expressions" version="4.3.0" targetFramework="net461" />
<package id="System.Net.Http" version="4.3.1" targetFramework="net461" />
<package id="System.Net.Primitives" version="4.3.0" targetFramework="net461" />
<package id="System.Net.Sockets" version="4.3.0" targetFramework="net461" />
<package id="System.ObjectModel" version="4.3.0" targetFramework="net461" />
<package id="System.Reflection" version="4.3.0" targetFramework="net461" />
<package id="System.Reflection.Extensions" version="4.3.0" targetFramework="net461" />
<package id="System.Reflection.Primitives" version="4.3.0" targetFramework="net461" />
<package id="System.Resources.ResourceManager" version="4.3.0" targetFramework="net461" />
<package id="System.Runtime" version="4.3.0" targetFramework="net461" />
<package id="System.Runtime.Extensions" version="4.3.0" targetFramework="net461" />
<package id="System.Runtime.Handles" version="4.3.0" targetFramework="net461" />
<package id="System.Runtime.InteropServices" version="4.3.0" targetFramework="net461" />
<package id="System.Runtime.InteropServices.RuntimeInformation" version="4.3.0" targetFramework="net461" />
<package id="System.Runtime.Numerics" version="4.3.0" targetFramework="net461" />
<package id="System.Security.Cryptography.Algorithms" version="4.3.0" targetFramework="net461" />
<package id="System.Security.Cryptography.Encoding" version="4.3.0" targetFramework="net461" />
<package id="System.Security.Cryptography.Primitives" version="4.3.0" targetFramework="net461" />
<package id="System.Security.Cryptography.X509Certificates" version="4.3.0" targetFramework="net461" />
<package id="System.Text.Encoding" version="4.3.0" targetFramework="net461" />
<package id="System.Text.Encoding.Extensions" version="4.3.0" targetFramework="net461" />
<package id="System.Text.RegularExpressions" version="4.3.0" targetFramework="net461" />
<package id="System.Threading" version="4.3.0" targetFramework="net461" />
<package id="System.Threading.Tasks" version="4.3.0" targetFramework="net461" />
<package id="System.Threading.Timer" version="4.3.0" targetFramework="net461" />
<package id="System.Xml.ReaderWriter" version="4.3.0" targetFramework="net461" />
<package id="System.Xml.XDocument" version="4.3.0" targetFramework="net461" />

I would still be in peace with all of this if in the end I won't be presented with:

Exception thrown: 'System.MissingMethodException' in ThruThink.dll
Additional information: Method not found: 'Void System.Web.Http.HttpResponseException..ctor(System.Net.Http.HttpResponseMessage)'.

I couldn't figure out why this happened. Nager.Date owner gave me an idea: he generated the latest package with VS 2017, so I installed that hoping that it'll install some assemblies which will magically solve this exception. But that didn't happen so far.

I don't understand the list of these packages. A lot of them are foundational libraries which supposed to be part of the CLR itself (like System.IO, System.Console, ...) and available without a NuGet package. Maybe one clue is that I see Microsoft.NETCore.Platforms, although I'm with .NET 4.6.1, not using .NET Core. I haven't played with .NET Core too much yet, but those packages make sense for .NET Core infrastructure. What's going on?

---

The newest version of Nager.Date didn't pull in all of those dependencies and I don't face this problem any more.

Answer 1

You're hitting System.Net.Http OOB versioning issue, see Broken System.Net.Http 4.1.1-4.3.0 post-mortem. An assembly redirect should fix the problem:

<dependentAssembly>
  <assemblyIdentity name="System.Net.Http" culture="neutral" publicKeyToken="b03f5f7f11d50a3a" />
  <bindingRedirect oldVersion="0.0.0.0-4.2.0.0" newVersion="4.2.0.0" />
</dependentAssembly>

You may need to redirect to 4.1.1.2 or 4.0.0.0 instead, depending on your project and the libraries you reference.