Referenced DLL not copied to Output directory

Question

I have 2 projects in my solution: project A and B. I added a dll reference to my project A. Now when i build the project A the dll is copied to the project A output directory. Now if i reference project to project A from project B, the dll is newer copied to projects B output folder. Why is that?

Is this by design from Microsoft?

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1132243/msbuild-doesnt-copy-references-dlls-if-using-project-dependencies-in-solution — adt, Apr 04 '12 at 09:04

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Apr 04 '12 at 09:00

3

Is this by design from Microsoft?

Yes.

answered Apr 04 '12 at 09:00

gdoron

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score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 04 '12 at 09:04

You can choose wether the assemblies are copied by setting the "copy to output" option.

In my projects the once which produce a runtime (Console,App, unit tests)..), are copying refs to local. This is important because without that the app wouldn't run.

The other projects (components and so on) are bulding to a central binary folder and are not copying their references, becuase they were taken from there. This saves a huge amount of build time.

Referenced DLL not copied to Output directory

2 Answers2