Question

Can I safely move ReferencePath information from a .vbproj.user (or .csproj.user) file into the corresponding project file?

Will this break anything?

Note: All developers will be using developing from the same location on their machines.

We’d like to allow users to maintain their own settings for other things, but have this basic info be setup once and checked into source control to be shared to all.

Answer 1

Yes, you can absolutely do this. In fact, we have all external assemblies in directories relative to the project to ensure that developer-specific updates don’t cross-contaminate the projects.

In the project files, all of our references to non-.net framework assemblies are specified similar to the following:

<Reference Include="ICSharpCode.SharpZipLib">
  <SpecificVersion>False</SpecificVersion>
  <HintPath>..\..\Assemblies\ICSharpCode.SharpZipLib.dll</HintPath>
  <Private>False</Private>
</Reference>

This takes a little discipline to start with, but ultimate makes the projects portable and update-safe.