Ce site est optimisé pour être consulté depuis un navigateur moderne dans lequel JavaScript est activé.

MSBuild doesn't copy references (DLL files) if using project dependencies in solution

ayi

<t>MSBuild doesn't copy references (DLL files) if using project dependencies in solution</t>

ayi

<t>I'm not sure why it is different when building between Visual Studio and MsBuild, but here is what I have found when I've encountered this problem in MsBuild and Visual Studio. 
 
Explanation 
 
For a sample scenario let's say we have project X, assembly A, and assembly B. Assembly A references assembly B, so project X includes a reference to both A and B. Also, project X includes code that references assembly A (e.g. A.SomeFunction()). Now, you create a new project Y which references project X. 
 
So the dependency chain looks like this: Y => X => A => B 
 
Visual Studio / MSBuild tries to be smart and only bring references over into project Y that it detects as being required by project X; it does this to avoid reference pollution in project Y. The problem is, since project X doesn't actually contain any code that explicitly uses assembly B (e.g. B.SomeFunction()), VS/MSBuild doesn't detect that B is required by X, and thus doesn't copy it over into project Y's bin directory; it only copies the X and A assemblies. 
 
Solution 
 
You have two options to solve this problem, both of which will result in assembly B being copied to project Y's bin directory:

Add a reference to assembly B in project Y.
Add dummy code to a file in project X that uses assembly B. 
 
Personally I prefer option 2 for a couple reasons.
If you add another project in the future that references project X, you won't have to remember to also include a reference to assembly B (like you would have to do with option 1).
You can have explicit comments saying why the dummy code needs to be there and not to remove it. So if somebody does delete the code by accident (say with a refactor tool that looks for unused code), you can easily see from source control that the code is required and to restore it. If you use option 1 and somebody uses a refactor tool to clean up unused references, you don't have any comments; you will just see that a reference was removed from the .csproj file. 
 
Here is a sampl 
 
(Réponse tronquée)</t>