Fixing “Did you mean to run dotnet SDK commands?” error when running dotnet –version

I recently installed the dotnet 1.11.0 Windows Server Hosting package which apparently installs the .NET Core Runtime. I did so on my development box. After doing so, I noticed that I couldn’t run dotnet –version or any dotnet commands (like dotnet build).

Did you mean to run dotnet SDK commands? Please install dotnet SDK from:

I also noticed my .NET Core projects were failing to load in Visual Studio.

Project file is incomplete. Expected imports are missing.

What I finally realized after running, after running Get-Command in PowerShell, was that dotnet was being loaded out of the Program Files (x86) directory.

I looked in my environment variables, and sure enough, the PATH variable had the x86 path before the regular Program Files path. Moving the order fixed my development environment.

Strangely enough, it also didn’t affect my IIS site using .NET Core. It still runs fine after changing the order of the environment variable.