CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#.netdll
Dave Gordon
Dave Gordon

Reputation: 1835

Handling .dll not in GAC moving between DEBUG and Release

Ok, I have had a good look and found nothing useful on this problem. I have a solution in VS (Visual Studio). It has two projects say ProjectA and ProjectB.

ProjectA creates A.dll. ProjectB creates B.EXE which references A.dll.

In DEBUG mode everything works correctly as you would expect. However, in release mode the files are moved to where they will be located when installed. The A.dll will not be installed in the GAC. Because the A.dll is not where it is expected to be in relation to B.EXE the exes fail. Reasonable enough.

In the After Build Event I copy the .exes to c:\los\ and A.dll gets moved to c:\los\libs\

Currently I have to de-reference the A.dll and then re-reference it now pointing it to it's new location, rebuild and then the release version works. The real solution has a lot of projects and a great number of .dlls which means I can easily (and do) forget to re-reference new .dlls regularly.

Is there a way to automate this tiresome process?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 79

Answers (1)

Christoph
Christoph

Reputation: 2317

I believe you are looking for the probing feature of .Net. Here is the reference: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/823z9h8w.aspx

Example:

<configuration>
  <runtime>
    <assemblyBinding xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1">
      <probing privatePath="libs"/>
    </assemblyBinding>
  </runtime>
</configuration>

Probing has the limitation that only subfolders can be searched from where the executing EXE is running. However, since your EXE is in C:\Ios and the DLL is in the subfolder C:\Ios\Libs. Per the documentation you can specify multiple subfolders. I just put the "Libs" folder into the example to match your question.

Upvotes: 1

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