I've just been caught out by this - I found automatic binding redirects were only working when running from VisualStudio but not when running msbuild from the command line... the clue was that binding redirects were added in VS 2013 (for that read .net framework 4.5). If you open up a vs command prompt you'll see it now gets it from program files as the other article mentions. Whereas I was using a batch file on my path which linked to the old version.