Question

Can you ref another utility project as you could with a file system project? I’m not really finding that as an option. I can browse for a file system location, but not for a TFS source control location – or is VS2010 smart enough to know your locally mapped location of the dll reference? I guess I should preference with the fact that we are learning TFS at work here and obviously fumbling through with no formal training or consultants.

Thanks!

Answer 1

There is no suitable way to manage external dependencies.

Some people say, it is better to have all dependencies together in the solution that uses them. We ended up creating a project “External” that only contains the external depencies, i.e. the assemblies. These assemblies are checked in. This approach gives you the opportunity to get any version out of your source control and it is compilable out of the box. You don’t have to bother with any dependencies that are managed outside of your solution.

Other people say that there are reasons to manage dependencies outside your solution. But there are no practices I know off that support this approach.

For further information have a look at How do you share external dependencies between Visual Studio solutions?