We have several c# projects, libraries and solutions (a few asp.net applications, a few class libraries, windows applications like windows services and winform apps. etc.) which most of them depends each others output dlls. Some of our projects are grouped into solutions and they use project dependency. But some projects are not.
We are (unfortunately) using VSS to manage source. When referencing assemblies to a project sometimes i see refresh files stored in vss but the actual dll never comes when you initially get the latest version, sometimes just the assemblies but not vss managed, sometimes just the assemblies and they seem to be managed by vss. As you can guess it is a nightmare to manage these files for us, especially when publishing the web apps. we are never sure that teh latest verisons of the library dlls are being published.
Can you advice any best practices about managing this complexity ? Any articles are welcome too. Should we keep all libraries in a network folder and use refresh files ? So every developer in the team should copy his output file to that network share ?
Thanks,
Umut
What I do to solve this is to drop a copy of the referenced DLLs in my web apps’ bin directory, and include them as part of the project, saved in source safe.
That way, if the DLL is ever updated, it is as simple as Check Out – Overwrite – Check In, and all members on the team can have the latest file.
And, in addition, it makes deployment easy, as the files are included during a publish. Just set the build type to content.