Question

My colleague saved a visual studio C# express project on a dropbox folder and I opened it from this folder. We addded the reference paths but some namespaces are still not recognized. What should we do and is it possible to work together from dropbox on the project?

Answer 1

The way that we have resolved this is to include all external, non-framework assemblies required by the application in sub-folder relative to the project and then when the assemblies are referenced, we edit the csproj file and ensure that the assembly references are relative instead of absolute.

For example:

Solution Folder
  Assemblies
    MyAssembly.dll

  Project Folder
    MyProject.csproj

  MyProject.sln

If MyProject.csproj has a reference to MyAssembly.dll, then the reference in the csproj will be something like:

<Reference Include="MyAssembly">
  <HintPath>..\Assemblies\MyAssembly.dll</HintPath>
</Reference>

This practice ensures that all projects are always built and tested with the exact same set of DLLs and are not influenced by different updates installed on each developer’s machine.