Are all of the ASP.NET MVC 4 RC assemblies really necessary for a ASP.NET WebAPI RC deployment?

Question

When I created a \"Empty WebAPI\" project in Visual Studio 2010, several of the new assemblies to support the MVC web pages were added as references (an example of the few in th

Answer 1

No, you don't need all those assemblies.

I always prefer to build my Web API projects from scratch. I don't use the templates. I simply create an empty ASP.NET Project and add the Microsoft.AspNet.WebApi NuGet package.

Here are the references that seem to only be needed:

Microsoft.CSharp
Microsoft.Web.Infrastructure   // Microsoft.Web.Infrastructure NuGet package
Newtonsoft.Json                // Newtonsoft.Json NuGet package
System.Net.Http                // Microsoft.Net.Http NuGet package
System.Net.Http.Formatting     // Microsoft.AspNet.WebApi.Client NuGet package
System.Net.Http.WebRequest     // Microsoft.Net.Http NuGet package
System.Web.DynamicData
System.Web.Entity
System.Web.ApplicationServices
System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations
System
System.Data
System.Core
System.Data.DataSetExtensions
System.Web.Extensions
System.Web.Http                // Microsoft.AspNet.WebApi.Core NuGet package
System.Web.Http.WebHost        // Microsoft.AspNet.WebApi.WebHost NuGet package
System.Xml.Linq
System.Drawing
System.Web
System.Xml
System.Configuration
System.Web.Services
System.EnterpriseServices