Why can't Jenkins find this .NET AssemblyFoldersEx registry key?

Question

So I have a project that builds fine on my development machine, but not on my CI server (Jenkins).

Jenkins can't find my Primary Interop Assemblies even after I've copied over various folders from my machine to make them available to it.

On my machine, where everything works, I can turn on my Visual Studio's option for "diagnostic"-level output, and I can see how it figures out where these PIA's are at...

Primary reference "Microsoft.mshtml, Version=7.0.3300.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a".
  Resolved file path is "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft.NET\Primary Interop Assemblies\Microsoft.mshtml.dll".
  Reference found at search path location "{Registry:Software\Microsoft\.NETFramework,v4.6.1,AssemblyFoldersEx}".

See that registry key referenced above? When I go into my registry.. I can find hives for:

• Software\Microsoft\.NETFramework
• Software\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\.NETFramework

Each hive has several keys, like

• v4.5.50709
• v3.5
• etc...

But nowhere do I see the v4.6.1 key that seems to be indicated in the build output snippet I've pasted above. If there's some way to discover this and/or, better way to configure Jenkins so it can properly reference Microsoft.mshtml.dll I'd be much obliged.

Loveinidleness

thanks to mr. anonymous for voting my question down w/o explanation - I did rephrase my question to be more specific.. hope that helped a bit and would appreciate anyone's feedback if they've encountered similar issues setting up their CI environment. You can see my answer over at this question on why I eventually ended up deleting the code that required this dependency in the first place. – Loveinidleness

Answer 1

After a long and laborious search, I found that I have some "PIA" redist.exe's on my developer box, at the following location:

C:/Program Files (x86)/Common Files/Merge Modules

I have several of these, due to multiple versions of Visual Studio being installed on my machine. I'm sure I probably only needed to run one of them.. Regardless, I double-clicked each .exe (I had a window on my CI server that was peaking through to my dev workstation) and installed each onto my Jenkins server.

Problem solved!

Loveinidleness