I have 3 C# projects, A (WPF application), B (class library), and C (class library), such that A references B, and B reference C. Project C needs to call some native methods from a C++ DLL via P/Invoke. I added the native DLLs to the C# project and marked them a "Copy to Output Directory". When I build my solution, the native DLLs show up in the output directory for Projects B and C (correctly), but not for Project A. Is there a project setting that allows these to be copied by any project that ultimately references Project C (even if not directly)? Or do I just need to post-build event on Project A to copy this files to my application output folder?
I've looked at Dependencies of references not copied to output directory, but this was referring to project references, so I'm wondering if there is a solution in my case.
I also considered embedding the native DLLs as resources and modifying my DLLImport as in this MSDN article: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.runtime.interopservices.dllimportattribute.dllimportattribute.aspx. But I get an E_ACCESSDENIED error (I've seen others with this same issue as well, as well as some concerns about triggering antivirus behavior when extracting the DLL to disk). I also noticed the article mentions linking the resource, rather than embedding it. Is this something I need to do as an MSBuild task, rather than through some project properties?
Worst case, I could just add a post-build event to my WPF application that copies the native files, but it would be nice if Visual Studio would recognize that these files should be copied.
