Question

For a .NET solution, is there a way to get all the .dll files for each project in the solution? For example, if I make an empty .NET solution (this is Visual Studio 2010 btw), and add 3 projects called “a”, “b” and “c”, and build each, providing me with dll’s a.dll, b.dll, and c.dll, is there any code sample in either C# or Powershell which could give me a collection of of these .dlls (but not any other .dlls like 3rd party libraries used)?

Thanks

Answer 1

One simple way (without writing a VS addin) would be parsing the project file. The project file (which is in XML format) will have an element called ProjectReference (regular references are in another element, called Reference):

<Project ...>
  <ItemGroup>
    <ProjectReference Include="..\path\YourProject.csproj">
      ...
    </ProjectReference>
  </ItemGroup>
</Project>

You could simply parse this, with any XML API you have in your toolset and get the name of the dll by using the name of the project (the Include attribute). This works of course only if your project has the same name as the dll. If it hasn’t, you could open the csproj file and find the element <AssemblyName>