What s the difference setting Embed Interop Types true and false in Visual Studio

Question

In Visual Studio  when adding one reference to the project  the properties window has an option Embed Inteop Types  should we set it to True or False  What s the difference   Since we have a lot of projects  among some of them  reference was set to False  others were set to True  it is totally mess up  And the bulid server also have the same warnings       What does    reference was created to embedded interop assembly    mean    So we plan to change all the Embed Inteop Types to False  what risk would we get

User · Answer

I noticed that when it s set to false  I m able to see the value of an item using the debugger  When it was set to true  I was getting an error -       item FullName GetValue  The embedded interop type  FullName  does not contain a definition for  QBFC11Lib IItemInventoryRet  since it was not used in the compiled assembly  Consider casting to object or changing the  Embed Interop Types  property to true

User · Answer

This option was introduced in order to remove the need to deploy very large PIAs  Primary Interop Assemblies  for interop  It simply embeds the managed bridging code used that allows you to talk to unmanaged assemblies  but instead of embedding it all it only creates the stuff you actually use in code  Read more in Scott Hanselman s blog post about it and other VS improvements here  As for whether it is advised or not  I m not sure as I don t need to use this feature  A quick web search yields a few leads   Check your Embed Interop Types flag when doing Visual Studio extensibility work The Pain of deploying Primary Interop Assemblies  The only risk of turning them all to false is more deployment concerns with PIA files and a larger deployment if some of those files are large

[c#] What's the difference setting Embed Interop Types true and false in Visual Studio?

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