How do I ensure that Visual Studio copies dependencies of dependencies to the output folder?

Question

I am using Visual Studio 2010 to manage a web application. This web application is organised into a number of projects, where the UI itself is one project, and the business logic resides in another assembly which is then set up as a project reference for the UI, and makes calls out to code in third-party libraries.

When I do a deployment build, MSBuild creates the usual _PublishedWebsites folder and copies the web application into there. What it does not do is copy the dependencies of the business layer, which means nasty YSOD when I try to run the application. Now, I can set the third-party libraries as references of the UI project, and that ensures the libraries are copied and deployed as expected - however, that rather misses the point of having the business layer doing all the work, and means additional maintenance in that when another third-party library is added, it needs to be added in more than one place.

How can I ensure, once and for all, that dependencies of my business layer are deployed to the _PublishedWebsites folder when the deployment build is run?

Answer 1

It isn't a perfectly automated solution, but you can solve this with a post-build script on your main project.

I've found that the $(WebProjectOutputDir) variable is managed such that it resolves to the "_PublishedWebsites" directory when you supply an output directory that is not equal to the directory of the project being built. (Otherwise, it is the same as the current project directory.) So, for your problem, you could put this in the post build of your web application:

xcopy /Y /S "$(ProjectDir)..\Your Business Logic Project\bin" "$(WebProjectOutputDir)\bin"

It should work both on your machine and on your build server.

Answer 2

As per my comment to @Shaun Plourde's response, it appears that this scenario is not supported. If you want indirectly-referenced assemblies to appear in the build output, you'll need to reference them directly.

Answer 3

This should just work out of the box with VS.NET. Try setting "Copy local" to true where the dependencies are actually needed. Your UI project should not require any explicit references to those assemblies.

For smaller projects, this may scale fine in terms of compilation performance. For larger projects, you may want to consider alternative approaches such as those outlined in Patrick Smacchia's article at http://www.simple-talk.com/dotnet/.net-framework/partitioning-your-code-base-through-.net-assemblies-and-visual-studio-projects/.