.NET Automatic include of assembly

Question

Not sure if this can be done, but here goes anyways.

I've written an N-tier application that's going to be implemeneted by end users. I wanted to expose 1 class only in a Project I called Myapp.client. Now, I want end users to ONLY have to include this DLL in their projects when working with the application. The problem I face though is that the Client Project (dll) obvioiusly has references to other projects in my solution. When testing by only including the client dll, I always get this type of compile error (which is normal and I understand it):

Error 1 The type 'XXXX.DataObjects.Someclass' is defined in an assembly that is not referenced. You must add a reference to assembly 'XXXX.DataObjects, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=8eefc54a8e08e7cc'.

Is there any way to automatically include these references when someone includes the client dll? Or would I have to rewrite the app to include everything in the client dll?

Thanks.

Answer 1

This sounds like a plugin architecture to me. The dll, what the plugin implementor should implement should ideally contain a clean interface. Of course that interface may contain some types what belongs to your code too. You have to refactor our architecture in a way that those types would be interfaces too, and ideally would be in one or few assemblies. Then you only have to provide the plugin-in interface assembly and the other slim interface assembly(s) to the client.

BTW, have you looked into MEF? Some years ago it was a CodePlex project but for a while now it's part of the .NET base now. It provides convenient way to decouple such architecture. link You just have to use [Export(...)] and [Import(...)] attributes and configure it's discovery. MEF also can serve as an IoC/Dependency Injection framework.

Answer 2

If you have control over how client applications are built - and you can deploy missing assemblies to your clients - you can auto-resolve references during build.

In other cases, you would have to either rewrite your main assembly to include all referenced code, or combine several assemblies into one using ILMerge.