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Hello :) I'm fairly new to C# / .NET and i have some questions regarding project dependency.

First: my situation. I have a Solution - let's call it MyLibrary - which have several .dll-Output Projects. This projects are dependant from each other (as project references) and also from some external libraries (.dll-References). I ensured that the project references a specific copy of the external references.

Now I have a second solution - MyApplication - which has some of the above Library-Projects and additional projects. So all of my own projects reference to each other iva project reference. I have set up all projects with the reference setting "Copy Local: True".

My Problem now is, that MyApplication throws an error saying that one of the library-projects has a different version - which is strange since if I build MyApplication it should build all required projects.

My questions now:

  • If I have Project C which depends on Project B which again depends on Project A, I need to reference Project A in Project C even if Project C don't use any types from Project A. Is there a workaround for this?
  • Can I get a clean output log where it states which project is build when? From the Visual Studio Output-Log I have troubles to differ wether the project is "rebuild" or just has copied to destination folder
  • Are there Tools, which read out the *.sln or *.csproj files and shows me directly which assemblie references which assembly?
  • As I said, I have included in MyApplication several projects from MyLibrary and set the references of the MainProject in MyApplication to "Copy Local: True". If I clean up MyApplication (the solution) it deletes all *.dll from the MyLibrary-Destination-Folder. Can I surpress this behavior somehow (it should only delete the *.dll's from the MyApplication-destination-folder).

Thanks four your help.

P.S.: I'm from Germany and I have the "Galileo"-Book about C# which covers this topic not very good. Are there some good tutorials / books which are directly about the Project Management Functionality of Visual Studio ?

S. Richter
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2 Answers2

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In answer a couple of your questions:

If I have Project C which depends on Project B which again depends on Project A, I need to reference Project A in Project C even if Project C don't use any types from Project A. Is there a workaround for this?

I don't think this is true in general. You will only need to reference A if B exposes some of the types from A. For example if a class in B inherits from a class in A then yes, C will need A since C needs to know about the base class. However if B 'hides' A behind all is own classes/interfaces then C does not need to know about A.

Are there Tools, which read out the *.sln or *.csproj files and shows me directly which assemblie references which assembly?

You can get this information directly from the metadata of the assembly. Reflector is a great tool for this. It was free, but it appears they started charging for it 4 days ago (bummer!)

The other 2 questions about visual studio issues I'm not that familiar with. But in general I'm surprised you are getting the version error. Are you trying to use strong name assemblies? Personally I wouldn't advise that unless you are making these assemblies available to the public. It these assemblies are just for separation of concerns within your own application then there shouldn't really be versioning to speak of. The resulting application will be compiled against the latest version of each sub-project, and each sub-project will only be compiled when it changes.

In any case you must somewhere be specifying that you require a specific version of a particular assembly (in an app.config/web.config probably). Can you just remove the version constraint from this configuration?

James Gaunt
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  • Use Resharper. It has a function to show all dependencies as a visual graph: http://blog.jetbrains.com/dotnet/2013/06/13/resharper-8-architecture-tools/ – Anders Jan 30 '14 at 10:20
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Quoting James Gaunt answer

I don't think this is true in general. You will only need to reference A if B exposes some >of the types from A. For example if a class in B inherits from a class in A then yes, C >will need A since C needs to know about the base class. However if B 'hides' A behind all >is own classes/interfaces then C does not need to know about A.

Thanks so much for this clarification! For replicate this by my own, I created a sample Solution that contains 3 projects: A, B, and C; more details about the projects below:

  • Project C does not have a reference to any project on the solution; it also defines a class called FooC.
  • Project B has a reference to Project C, and define a class called FooB which also contains two methods: PrintB, and PrintC. The PrintB return's type is a primitive value (an int), whereas PrintC return's type is a FooCinstance (the class defined on the project C).
  • Project A has a reference to Project B, and consumes functionalities (FooB class) implemented on Project B.

So if someone from Project A makes a call to PrintC method, a reference to project C must be required, just because its return's type is a type (a class) defined on the project C (compiler must resolve this dependency). However, if instead of calling the PrintC method, the PrintB is the one called, then the reference to project C is not needed because its return type is a primitive type (a known one).

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alfonsohdez08
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