Visual Studio Relative Assembly References Paths

Question

When adding a reference to an assembly located within the solution directory  is there any way to add it relatively  so that when checked in and out of a repository it is referenced in projects correctly

User · Accepted Answer

To expand upon Pavel Minaev s original comment - The GUI for Visual Studio supports relative references with the assumption that your  sln is the root of the relative reference  So if you have a solution C  myProj myProj sln  any references you add in subfolders of C  myProj  are automatically added as relative references   To add a relative reference in a separate directory  such as C  myReferences myDLL dll  do the following    Add the reference in Visual Studio GUI by right-clicking the project in Solution Explorer and selecting Add Reference    Find the   csproj where this reference exist and open it in a text editor  Edit the  lt  HintPath   to be equal to    lt HintPath gt       myReferences myDLL dll lt  HintPath gt    This now references C  myReferences myDLL dll   Hope this helps

User · Answer

In VS 2017 it is automatic  So just Add Reference as usually    Note that in Reference Properties absolute path is shown  but in  vbproj  csproj relative is used    lt Reference Include  NETnetworkmanager  gt         lt HintPath gt       libs NETnetworkmanager dll lt  HintPath gt         lt EmbedInteropTypes gt True lt  EmbedInteropTypes gt   lt  Reference gt

User · Answer

As mentioned before  you can manually edit your project s  csproj file in order to apply it manually   I also noticed that Visual Studio 2013 attempts to apply a relative path to the reference hintpath  probably because of an attempt to make the project file more portable

User · Answer

I might be off here  but it seems that the answer is quite obvious  Look at reference paths in the project properties  In our setup I added our common repository folder  to the ref path GUI window  like so    That way I can copy my dlls  ready for publish  to this folder and every developer now gets the updated DLL every time it builds from this folder   If the dll is found in the Solution  the builder should prioritize the local version over the published team version

User · Answer

Yes  just create a directory in your solution like lib   and then add your dll to that directory in the filesystem and add it in the project  Add- Existing Item- etc    Then add the reference based on your project     I have done this several times under svn and under cvs

User · Answer

Probably  the easiest way to achieve this is to simply add the reference to the assembly and then  manually  patch the textual representation of the reference in the corresponding Visual Studio project file  extension  csproj  such that it becomes relative   I ve done this plenty of times in VS 2005 without any problems

[visual-studio-2008] Visual Studio: Relative Assembly References Paths

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