Question

Something strange happened -at least for me – , as I know in a 3 tier model you make DLLs and let your UI make a reference to them , right now I’m working like this: ClassLibrary project for the DAL, another one for the BLL with reference to the DAL DLL located on the DAL bin/debug directory so that the BLL ClassLibrary project implements the DAL changes immediately , then a Windows Application project with references to both BLL and DAL DLLs located on their respective bin/debug directories .
Then I wanted to test and to examine the exceptions generated when the aplication can’t find the DLLs it’s referencing , I cutted the DLLs and putted them in another location , the Application is still working fine !!? , thats was strange enough but I guessed maybe when running the Windows application it recreates those DLLs again so I put those DLLs on another folder in the Desktop and I delete the old references from the Windows application and recreated them pointing this time to the ones on the Desktop folder and tested it , after that I delete the Desktop folder and the application still working fine and connecting to the database and every thing ???
Environment:
XP SP2 VisualStudio 2008 C#

Answer 1

You can’t test this within Visual Studio as the build / debug / run will rebuild the references.
Removing the references will break your code as the compiler will balk and refuse to compile the app as you have noted.

You will need to compile the app, then remove the DLLs from the bin folder using windows explorer and then run the application by double clicking the app. not using Visual Studio.

This will throw an exception of some descrioption which will pop up in a little box. The JIT Debugger might also catch it (maybe??) and let you attach to the process using VS but I’m not sure.