ASP .NET CORE could not find file or assembly with custom assembly

The .NET Core Tooling in VS 2017 (< 15.3 preview) / .NET CLI < 2.0 doesn't fully support referencing assemblies on disk. You need to package the library up as a NuGet package or use a project reference ("same solution"). The technical reason is that all the required assemblies and versions are resolved during compilation and written to the .deps.json file. When loading arbitrary assemblies, this might fail because either the assembly or its dependencies cannot be found (or a conflict with each other).