Question

I’m having trouble setting the path to a DLL that is not in the same directory as the executable.

I have a reference to dllA.dll. At present, everything is just copied into the same directory and all is well; however, I need to move the executable to another directory while still referencing the DLL in the original directory.

So, it’s setup like:

C:\Original\Dir

program.exe
dllA.dll
dllB.dll
dllC.dll

But I need to have it setup like:

C:\New\Dir

program.exe
dllB.dll
dllC.dl

Such that it is still able to reference dllA.dll in C:\Original\dir

I tried the following, but to no avail:

• Set the “Copy Local” value to false for dllA.dll because I want it to be referenced in its original location.
• Under “Tools > Options > Projects and Solutions > VC++ Directories” I have added the path to “C:\Original\Dir”
• Added “C:\Original\Dir” to both the PATH and LIB environment variables

At runtime, it informs me that it cannot locate dllA.dll Maybe the above steps I took only matter at compile time?

I was able to find this
C# : Specifying a location for Dll reference

But I was thinking that my above method should’ve worked.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

While I may still foolishly believe this can be accomplished through specifying the proper path variables, I was able to overcome this issue by adding some entries to my app.config

<runtime>
<assemblyBinding xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1">
  <dependentAssembly>
    <assemblyIdentity name="dllA" publicKeyToken="blah" culture="neutral" />
    <codeBase version="blah" href="file:///C:/Original/Dir/dllA.dll" />
  </dependentAssembly>
</runtime>