How to reference external assemblies from an ASP.NET web site

Question

I need to reference external assemblies from a dozen asp.net web sites. These assemblies won't be in the GAC, but will be located in a location relative to the web site ("..\..\dlls\release").

From what I understand, Visual studio doesn't have an explicit assembly reference, or way to link a web site to an external .csproj or .dll library. (Unlike a web project).

These sites are sample projects for the open-source image-resizing HttpModule http://imageresizingin.net/.

I don't want to make users run a .bat file to copy the dlls into each /bin folder.

Is there some secret hints file I can use to let visual studio know where to look?

I'm working on dynamic assembly resolution, but that won't help visual studio at all, just hosted versions of the site.

Answer 1

Add the assemblies' full names to the <compilation> element of Web.config, and put them in the GAC on your dev machine.