How to use my DLL when it is not in the GAC

Question

If I have a Project which uses my own made .dll and this .dll is not registered with the GAC but simply in the same folder as my projects App. eg C:\Program Files (x86)\MyApp Folder.

Can I, and more importantly how do I properly reference this .dll if I want to for example build a second project which also uses this .dll. It is possible that I build a few small apps that will use this .dll.

In this case must I have it in the GAC or if it is not there what must I do?

Answer 1

If I have a Project...

You should never put yourself in a situation where you have just a project. You first and foremost have a solution. A collection of projects that, together, build an app. Projects of course have a dependency on each other, you use a project dependency to tell the compiler about. Which automatically takes care of reference assemblies, the output of one project becomes the reference of another. And any changes you make to the source code of such a project automatically propagate to the others.

This is usually as far as teams take it.

This however tends to not work so well on very large solutions with dozens of projects, Visual Studio tends to get sluggish and building can take a long time. An important step to take in such a case is to freeze a root project. A programmer needs to get an explicit permission to make changes to such a core project. Because such a change tends to be very destabilizing, requiring many changes in dependent projects. And effectively destroys many hours of testing and validation time.

You do this by explicitly removing a project from a solution. Which now automatically makes it difficult to make changes to it. The dependent projects need to be updated to use an explicit reference assembly instead of the project dependency. Picking a well-known location for the assembly is important. Either source control or (preferrably) a build server is instrumental to be the source of the assembly. A tool like Nuget can be very useful.