I had this problem myself. Most of the information I could find online was related to people having this problem with an ASP.NET web application. I was creating a Win Forms stand alone app so most of the advice wasn’t helpful for me.
Turns out that the problem was that my project was set to use the “.NET 4 Framework Client Profile” as the target framework and the System.Web.Extensions reference was not in the list for adding. I changed the target to “.NET 4 Framework” and then the reference was available by the normal methods.
Here is what worked for me step by step:
- Right Click you project Select Properties
- Change your Target Framework to “.NET Framework 4”
- Do whatever you need to do to save the changes and close the preferences tab
- Right click on the References item in your Solution Explorer
- Choose Add Reference…
- In the .NET tab, scroll down to System.Web.Extensions and add it.