Improve the user experience for Add reference quick action with respect to Incompatible references

[vsfeedback]

This issue has been moved from a ticket on Developer Community.

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[severity:It's more difficult to complete my work]
When a project reference from .NET Core (.NET 6) project to .NET Framework project is missing, adding it through quick actions and refactoring menu (Alt+Enter or Ctrl+.) does nothing.
This works for other combinations (e.g. .NET Core to .NET Core or .NET Core to .NET Standard or .NET Framework to .NET Standard or .NET Framework to .NET Framework).

How to reproduce:

1. Create a new solution
2. Add a .NET Framework (e.g. Windows Forms Application) project
3. Add a .NET Core (e.g. Windows Forms Application) project
4. Use a class in code from .NET Framework project in .NET Core code and try add missing project reference using quick actions and refactorings menu (Alt+Enter or Ctrl+.).

In step 4, selecting the option "Add reference to WinFormsApp1" will do nothing.

Expected behavior: project reference is added from the .NET Core project to the .NET Framework project.

(note: Launcher is the name of the .NET Core project in the screenshot))

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Original Comments

Feedback Bot on 10/17/2023, 08:02 AM:

(private comment, text removed)

Zhengye Xu [MSFT] on 10/17/2023, 11:53 AM:

(private comment, text removed)

Feedback Bot on 10/19/2023, 11:12 PM:

(private comment, text removed)

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Original Solutions

(no solutions)

[mavasani]

Chat history from the feedback ticket:

Drew: Probably shouldn't be showing this quick fix given it cannot be satisfied. Moving to CSPROJ for further triage, but might need to move over to productivity.

Jason: I wonder if we're correctly realizing it can't be applied once we go to apply, but since we can't do compatibility checks on a background thread we just skip it.

Manish: We should either not show this quick action for incompatible references OR show a suitable message once user tries to apply a quick action for an incompatible reference.

[janseris]

Hi, this is my ticket. The problem is that referencing .NET Framework projects from .NET Core projects does nothing via Quick Actions and Refactorings although that's completely fine but needs to be done manually because of that (which works).

I was not talking about illegal references which do not work like referencing .NET Core from .NET Framework projects.

The tester did not understand

References from Windows Forms project in .NET Core shown in the bug report (Target Framework Moniker net8.0-windows) to .NET Framework are completely legal.