CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#.netc++visual-studio-2010reference
Simon Fischer
Simon Fischer

Reputation: 3876

Why is it not possible to remove unused references in C#

Is there any reason for it is not possible with Visual Studio to remove unused references (to projects and assemblies) in C# and C++ projects while it is possible to do so from a Visual Basic project (see here)?

I know you can do it with other tools like Resharper, I was just wondering if there was any technical reason for not being able to do this in C# and C++ projects? Or did Microsoft just choose it to work like that. It seems to be a quite useful feature.

Upvotes: 7

Views: 1753

Answers (3)

sif
sif

Reputation: 123

I found this suggestion on Microsoft Connect. It sounds like Microsoft actually thinks it is a good idea but just did not have the "time" (read: priority) to implement it. Too bad!

Upvotes: 1

PawanS
PawanS

Reputation: 7193

This functionality is there for VB (via the "Unused References" button on the References property page).But is the case of CSharp, For example, a user could add a reference to an assembly in order for it to get copied to the output directory. They might be using the assembly via reflection instead of compiling against it -- in such cases, there is no way for VS to detect that such an assembly is "used". So designing such algorithm is not 100% successful. But flag is a option that assembly mark as "unused" (however, the user would still have the choice as to whether to remove the assembly from the list of references).

Remove unused namespaces can do a bit work towards this.

Upvotes: 0

Marc Gravell
Marc Gravell

Reputation: 1062745

Note that the compiler will automatically drop any unused references from the assembly, so at the assembly metadata level this is redundant. It then just becomes an IDE/tooling issue. Would it be impossible? no (although obviously it would need to keep any that are marked for copy-local, to ensure it gets deployed). We can probably assume, therefore, that it is simply a "time to implement vs utility" (compared to other more useful things that could be done).

I'm sure you could write an IDE extension for it if you wanted ;p

Upvotes: 10

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