Question

We have some assemblies that are not referenced by our solution directly but are required for other libraries we are using.

I noticed in VS 2010 you can add a deployable assemblies folder and that would cause the files in it to get copied to the bin while building, it seems this was removed in 2012 as all of the Microsoft stuff is available in nuget now.

What is the best way to achieve this same effect, can I just add a folder to my project and add an after build copy task to copy all of that into the bin or is there a better way to go about this.

Currently the dlls are sitting in the project root and have their build action set to content which I gather makes them get copied to the bin, however I’d like to make it a bit simpler and not have to rely on having to set things as content.

Answer 1

What you’re doing already isn’t a terrible way of handling things, to be honest, and the way we’ve always done so here in my day job is simply to add the assemblies into our solution as references; that does mean that they pollute Intellisense, however.

Alternatively, Phil Haack blogged that you can create a folder called _bin_deployableAssemblies and put your files in there; Visual Studio 2010 will automagically copy those into your bin folder as a part of its default build action.

This doesn’t work with TFS msbuild scripts, apparently, so The Dev Stop guys blogged about how to get that to work with TFS, using a customised Target in your msbuild script.

If _bin_deployableAssemblies is no longer working in Visual Studio 2012, I would guess you could add a build action to your project file, based on the TFS build action from The Dev Stop?