Home/ Questions/Q 8425241
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-06-10T04:13:00+00:00

I am creating a test project in Visual Studio 2010 for my existing project.

  • 0

I am creating a test project in Visual Studio 2010 for my existing project. I have added reference of one DLL that is being used in the project for which I am creating this test project.

Now problem is, after adding the reference of that DLL, when I am trying to execute the test, then I am getting a run time exception as 

System.IO.FileNotFoundException: Could not load file or assembly 
'SOME NAME, Version=2.5.2.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified

I have solved this issue by changing Copy Local attribute of that reference to True. But I dont want to change it to true. Because I dont want to make copy of this in test project’s debug folder.

Is there any other way to do so?

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    This is an important question I asked myself some years ago and found the following practical solution:

    • put all application dll (to test) in $root$\bin\Debug
    • put all your test dll in $root$\bin
    • for each test dll or exe, have a App.config file that looks like the content below (note that I include in the probing paths, .\Debug of course, but also .\NUnit\bin because I put the NUnit assemblies there)

    <?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″ ?>
    <configuration>
    <runtime>
    <assemblyBinding xmlns=”urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1″>
    <probing privatePath=”Debug;NUnit\bin” />
    </assemblyBinding>
    </runtime>
    </configuration>

    enter image description here

    Btw, just never use Copy Local = true, I wrote white books on this topic (it can slow down compilation time up to 10 times!)

    • 0