Question

I am working on various projects and I need some help but not if this is possible.

What I have are various C# projects which I want to have a C# Library that all my projects can
use, lets call this library 1.

Library 1 can make use of another library. lets call this library 2.

All projects will always use library 1 but not all projects will use library 2 within library 1.

Therefore at the moment if I create a new C# project and include library 1, I then get an error saying that library 2 isn’t available. I don’t really want to import library 2 unless the main project actually requires it. Therefore is there a way to make it so library 1 can ignore the using directive if library 2 is not available.

Hope this make sense, thanks for any help you can provide.

Answer 1

You should not do what you’re asking to do. If not all projects will need library 2, then you have two ways you should solve it:

Option 1: Refactor your projects so that library 2 is only included
when needed. If the executable project is the one that decides if
library 2 is necessary, then that’s the project that should reference
it (or not).

Option 2: Just include library 2 all of the time. If the main executable doesn’t
need it, so be it. But since library 1 references it, you’ll need it.

I would suggest option 1. Just by asking this question, I think you have a dependency issue, and that’s what should be fixed. There might be some complex solution for hacking around this, but that’s not good for long-term maintainability.

I would also suggest googling Stable Dependencies Principle.