My team member made a reference to a DLL on his local drive (e.g., C:\mystuff\thirdparty.dll) and checked in the project with the reference. I refreshed my local copy of the project and now I have a broken reference: <The system cannot find the reference specified>. I have the thirdparty.dll on my local machine, but it is not in the same directory my team member had it.
Should we be checking in thirdparty.dll itself into source control under our solution in a subdirectory using the relative path? When another developer gets the project, will it pull down the DLL and work automatically even if the developer didn’t ‘install’ the DLL beforehand?
Thanks.
If you create a ‘lib’ or ‘assemblies’ directory under the solution, or at least in the source control project, and add all 3d party assemblies and reference them there, it should eliminate many problems like yours.
Generally, you won’t have to use the 3d party installer, but that will depend on the product.