Best practice with dll archives

Question

So perhaps this is not the best practice of how to maintain dll's, but currently I am employing a repository of current dll versions, and an archive of older versions. The intent was to simply make it quicker to browse to the current version of a given dll when wishing to add a reference to one of them in any given project.

So when employing one in a project I have "copy local" set to true. However I have just realized that the path remains set at the repository location and that the dll in the project is being automatically replaced with the repo version should it be updated.

A further intent was to manually update to newer dll when appropriate, managed, and could be tested, rather than having potentially breaking changes introduced.

I see now this might be design as potentially in deployment a shared dll of the wrong version may break functionality anyhow. So I am wondering if there is a consensus of thought on how to maintain things or how to proceed?

Answer 1

The best practice is definitely to use a package manager, in C# it's usually nuget.

This blog explains how to host and deploy your own server. After that you manage your corporate dlls in the same way you manage external dlls, through nuget.