VS2010 can't find common C# dlls

Question

Sorry for the simple question, but this has been killing me and I can't seem to find the answer. I'm writing a Silverlight 5.0 application in C# with VS2010. .NET 4.5.40805 SP1Rel. In the directives of the codebehind, I've added "using System.Diagnostics;" so I can use "Process()". While intellisense will complete "System.Diagnostics" for me, I can't seem to use the Process class located therein. If I try to "Add reference" via the solution explorer, System.Diagnostics is not there.

Am I using the wrong directive? ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.diagnostics.process.aspx as well as the object explorer suggests I'm not) Is there somethings I'm missing for effectively adding these references? Please help me with this recurring problem. Thank you.

Answer 1

AFAIK, Silverlight doesn't have access to System.Diagnostics.Process because of its Core CLR and security considerations. The MSDN page you linked to doesn't have a "Microsoft Silverlight" framework version to look up which is a good marker for this. Any classes that do exist in Silverlight will have a "Silverlight" version of the MSDN page (don't look at the ".NET Framework 4" versions).

For example, the .NET Framework 4 version of the System.Diagnostics namespace shows a slew of entries: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.diagnostics.aspx However, the same page for Silverlight only shows a few: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.diagnostics%28VS.95%29.aspx

Answer 2

My guess is that your project is set to use a "Client Profile" version of the framework. You can change this by right-clicking your project and selecting properties, then under the Application tab, changing the target framework to something that doesn't use a "Client Profile".

If this isn't the case, then I'm not sure what to suggest and hope that someone more knowledgeable than I responds. :)