Question

Is there any reason for it is not possible with Visual Studio to remove unused references (to projects and assemblies) in C# and C++ projects while it is possible to do so from a Visual Basic project (see here)?

I know you can do it with other tools like Resharper, I was just wondering if there was any technical reason for not being able to do this in C# and C++ projects? Or did Microsoft just choose it to work like that. It seems to be a quite useful feature.

Answer 1

Note that the compiler will automatically drop any unused references from the assembly, so at the assembly metadata level this is redundant. It then just becomes an IDE/tooling issue. Would it be impossible? no (although obviously it would need to keep any that are marked for copy-local, to ensure it gets deployed). We can probably assume, therefore, that it is simply a “time to implement vs utility” (compared to other more useful things that could be done).

I’m sure you could write an IDE extension for it if you wanted ;p