Remove Application Files in Visual Studio

Question

I have a WPF project in Visual studio, and suddenly Microsoft.IdentityModel.dll has been included in Application Files. I don't know where it comes from and how to remove it. I know I can set Publish Status to Exclude, but does anyone know why it is there? I have made a text search in all files included in the solution but I'm not able to find it anywhere:

Answer 1

it might be a dependent dll to any reference you added to a project . try removing the reference and check whether it is dependent or not .

Answer 2

I had a similar problem and found the name of the mystery files in the other DLLs in the bin folder. VS appears to be detecting the dependencies and including the proper DLLs.

Try this PowerShell script to see if you can find hidden references:

get-childitem -file -recurse | Select-String -Pattern your_mystery_file | group path | select name