¿Es posible que un proyecto de sitio web haga referencia a una asamblea firmada en Visual Studio?

Question

Soy consciente de los siguientes dos tipos diferentes de proyectos web en Visual Studio 2008:

Proyecto de sitio web
• proyecto de aplicación web

  Un proyecto de aplicación web puede hacer referencia a un conjunto firmado siempre que el ensamblaje de la aplicación web también esté firmado con la misma clave. Sin embargo, esto no funciona con el proyecto del sitio web porque no hay lugar para firmar un ensamblaje. Creo que esto se debe a que la asamblea se compila dinámicamente en el servidor?

  De todos modos, ¿es posible obtener el proyecto del sitio web que trabaja con esta asamblea firmada? ¿O tendré que convertir este proyecto de sitio web en un proyecto de aplicación web?

  Editar:

  La siguiente situación me ha pedido que solicite aclaraciones en este asunto:

  Tengo una biblioteca de clases que está siendo referenciada por varios otros proyectos en mi solución en Visual Studio. Uno de los proyectos es una aplicación de Windows que se implementará a usuarios externos específicos. Para asegurarse de que la aplicación esté utilizando el ensamblaje correcto y también evitar que otros usen el ensamblaje (soy consciente de las limitaciones con respecto a su efectividad), se han firmado todos los ensamblajes y se declaran todas las clases de la biblioteca. como amigo (interno).

  El proyecto del sitio web no parece tener un camino para que firme su asamblea y obtengo el siguiente mensaje al intentar usar nada de la biblioteca: "La clase no es evaluable en este contexto porque es" amigo "" , que se espera.

  Los siguientes atributos están dentro del archivo ensedtingInfo.vb en My Class Library Project:

  <Assembly: InternalsVisibleTo("OtherProject1, PublicKey=AAA...")>
  <Assembly: InternalsVisibleTo("OtherProject2, PublicKey=AAA...")>
  ...
  

  Mi conclusión:

  Parece que la forma más limpia de hacerlo sería convertir el sitio web en una aplicación web, pero esto requeriría un poco de tiempo ya que nuestro sitio ya está bastante cariñado y, como se señaló en otras discusiones, puede ser bastante un dolor para hacer. En primer lugar, creo que crear una aplicación web en primer lugar puede haber sido una mejor idea y mucho más flexible para el desarrollo futuro.

Answer 1

There's no requirement for the two projects to be signed with the same key - after all the framework assemblies are all signed with MS's key, which you don't have access to yet you can happily reference them from both Web Site and Web Application projects.

There's nothing at all stopping you referencing a signed assembly from a Website project - what errors are you seeing?

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Edit to add

In light of your updated information, yes, I think you'll have to either:

1. Convert the web site to a web application - as you rightly point out, there's no way to sign the site, and indeed, there's no real control over the libraries that ASP.NET will generate for the site.
2. Compile two versions of the class library, one signed, the other not. You could probably use conditional compilation to achieve this.

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Edit to add

I think the conditional compilation will probably end up getting messy quickly, but in brief it would work like this:

• Open the Project Properties for the class library, and go to the Build tab.
• Switch the "Configuration" dropdown to "All Configurations"
• In the "Conditional compilation symbols" box, add a new symbol, such as "INTERNAL".

Go to the class libraries that you want to make public, and modify them to something like:

#if INTERNAL
  internal class MyClass
#else
  public class MyClass
#endif
  {
    [...]
  }

Then, when you need to produce the Public version of the library, remove the "INTERNAL" symbol from the properties and rebuild - you could make this easier by creating a new set of Debug and Release configurations that have this symbol defined, and switch between them using the Solution Configuration dropdown.

Potential issues:

1. It might not be easy to tell whether you've got the symbol defined or not - I don't know what the behaviour is in vanilla VS, however with ReSharper installed it will grey out the parts of the code that won't be compiled under the current set of symbols, and flags the class as inaccessible as you type.
2. You'll want to leave your properties and methods as public so that when you don't build it as "INTERNAL" you can access the them, but this will look a bit odd (although doesn't produce any warnings so clearly is legal).

Answer 2

Now that I have a clearer picture of the issue I see that my original answer does not apply well. What I have done before in a similar situation was to use source control to branch the code files for the "Friend" classes into the consuming project so that they compile as part of the consuming assembly.

In my case I was trying to reuse some code in different server control projects without putting it into a separate dll, but I suspect it would also work well for your website scenario. It would mean your web site has no need to reference the signed DLL because the classes are compiled as part of the site and therefore all of the internal declarations should be available to it.

I don't know if this would be an option for you or not, largely depends on what source control tool you use, how you have your code repository set up, and how comfortable you are with the branching and merging concept.

Answer 3

Public members of a signed assembly should be available to any other project which has access to the DLL. I have created several signed assemblies and distributed them to other members of my team, we have used them in a mix of websites, web projects and console apps. The only place we ran into a conflict was when we tried to use an assembly that referenced HttpContext.Current in a console app. Even that worked if we avoided the methods which utilized this reference.

The only case in which signing/keys should be an issue is if you are trying to make them "Friends", meaning that they can see eachothers internal types and methods. The rules about friends and signing are documented here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/0tke9fxk.aspx