title: Strong name required for assemblies referenced from unsigned project?
body: <p>I'm working on a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Communication_Foundation" rel="nofollow noreferrer">WCF</a> service. The WCF service interface and implementation are in separate projects. There's also a Windows service project to host the WCF service.</p>
  
  <p>One of the things the WCF service implementation needs to do is call out to several external (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOAP" rel="nofollow noreferrer">SOAP</a>) web services. The way we typically structure this is we create a separate class library project for the SOAP service(s); we'll create a Web reference and a factory/helper method in the class library.</p>
  
  <p>The above detail may or may not be pertinent to the real problem. Which is that I get an error when building the WCF service implementation project (where X is one of the SOAP service wrapper assemblies):</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>referenced assembly 'X' does not have a strong name  </p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>But the WCF service implementation project isn't set to be signed (nor is the interface project). And at this point the only two things referencing it are the Windows service project and a unit test project -- and neither of those is signed either.</p>
  
  <p>The WCF implementation also references other (pre-existing) web service wrapper projects, but it's only complaining about these two. I've pulled up an existing and a new project file in a text editor side by side... And I can's see any significant differences.</p>
  
  <p>I've also checked whether any of the projects is importing a setting that requires it to be signed, as described in Stack Overflow question <em><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15469534">Remove signing from an assembly</a></em>. That doesn't appear to be the case.</p>
  
  <p>I was attempting to use AutoMapper -- 1.1 since we're still on .NET 3.5 -- in my WCF implementation. That is a signed assembly, so I can see where it might have a problem reflecting on my code and the SOAP service wrappers. But it seems to me that would be a run-time problem, not build time. But because I suspected it might be at least a contributing factor, I removed AutoMapper and the dependent code but I still get the same error.</p>
  
  <p>I have researched the issue, most of the search results consist of instructions on how to sign (possibly third-party) assemblies.</p>
  
  <p>I've tried removing and re-adding the references, restarted Visual Studio and my PC.</p>
  
  <p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Visual_Studio#Visual_Studio_2010" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Visual Studio 2010</a> / .NET 3.5 on Windows&nbsp;7 64-bit.</p>
  
  <p>I'm sure I'm missing something fairly obvious ... I just can't figure out what.</p>