I was curiious to know what type of structures you use for your project references?
Where I work the developers have a shared folder called AssemblyCache (\\MACHINENAME\AssemblyCache) which is mapped to an R:\ via GPO in Windows 2008 AD (tied to the Developers AD group).
Our shared components have post-build events that copy them to something like this:
R:\.Net %VERSION%\Project\%SOMETHING%
Sometimes it’s followed by either ‘Common’ if it’s common to the project or something specific. There’s also a common directory for shared stuff under the .Net version folder.
This is so large projects over multiple solutions can reference the assemblies from a common place.
The build machine also has a shared drive of the same share name which the developers have mapped to S:. This allows them to get the latest working build should they need it.
All this is so someone can get on a new PC, and open a project without having to copy references to varying locations, and ensuring that dev a is referencing the assembly from the same place as dev b etc…
This solution works well for us, so I was wondering what, if any, solutions you have in-place for ensuring all developers reference assemblies from the same path?
You dont need to create a network share. I think you can get away with creating a virtual drive letter for a local folder using the windows subst command for example…
The advantage here is that an arbitrary path can be routed to a standard well defined path for assemblies hence for example different assembly versions can be remapped to the fixed reference path used by visual studio.