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I'm developing a series of plugins for a 3rd part application, and the vendor gives us all of their plugin assemblies along with some helper assemblies for working with their system.

Our code usually references these helper assemblies, but the their plugin assemblies still need to be copied to the external bin/debug or bin/release directory. Normally I would make this a post-build event on the main project, but since this project is a collection of individual projects with their own dependencies I am not sure what to do.

What are some recommendations (or best practices) for handling this situation in Visual Studio?

Joshua Lowry
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  • Are you speaking about deployment or ? – HABJAN Mar 30 '11 at 15:52
  • To be able to do any testing with the application all of the assemblies must be used (the vendor's plugin assemblies, the vendor's helper assemblies, third party component assemblies, and our plugin assemblies). We do not directly depend on the vendor's plugin assemblies or the third party component assemblies. – Joshua Lowry Mar 30 '11 at 17:36

1 Answers1

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Add the DLLs to your project in a folder with a descriptive name (libs, third-party etc...).

Set the Copy to Output Directory property on them (F4) to Copy if Newer or Copy Always.

Oded
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  • If I just had one project this would make sense. Unfortunately, I have multiple projects... since there is no main executable generated there is no primary project. – Joshua Lowry Mar 30 '11 at 17:34