Why does packaging my Sharepoint 2010 project break my references?

Question

Hello everyone,

I'm having a very frustrating issue where my SP2010 project in VS2010 where everything seems to be perfectly normal when I build/rebuild the solution, but when I go to "Package" the SP2010 project, though it builds and deploys successfully, one of the dependent assemblies loses one of its references to a different project in the solution - which also causes a run-time error.

Does anyone know of any additional build steps that occur when selecting Deploy/Package on a SP2010 project, or anything else that could be causing this to stop working?

Just confused as to why a build/rebuild causes no issues (in both Debug and Release configurations), but a Package/Deploy breaks...

For example:

Solution built (no problems)

After Package/Deploy

Answer 1

May be in your case if you are using a Third Party assembly or a Project reference in the project then you need to explictly add them to the Package. Please refer this link for more details.