I have a bunch of assemblies (DLLs) I want to reference in my current .NET 4.5 project. However, right now all of them sit in some local folder in my Hard Drive. When someone works on this same project, these reference assemblies obviously aren't in the same local folder. My plan is to copy these assemblies into some folder in my project, and put that in source control.
Is this a good plan? And what folder do these things usually go to?
NuGet is a prefer method; however, some assemblies are not in NuGet. So here is an example what nopCommerce does.
Create a Dependencies folder (inside your project folder)
Keeps all third parties assemblies inside it.
Definitely a good idea. Generally I'll have a "dependencies" directory at the top level of the solution (or one higher if you have one), with all the DLLs that the projects use. Those are in source control, so when you check the code out, it will just work as-is, since the DLLs are all relative to the projects.
NuGet is the most common way to use external libraries and it places the dependencies in a folder called Packages at the root of the solution folder. You can create a folder called dependencies for your non-nuget dependencies. By placing this folder at the root of your solution you can make relative references so that works for everyone.
Better way to GAC all the DLL assemblies.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ex0ss12c(v=vs.80).aspx
gacutil -i "DLL File Path"
Related
Backgroud:
I am in the process of migrating a console application to be part of our existing web API project. All development work is done on Visual Studiod 2015 (with IIS Express). The application uses few third party datasource api DLLs to grab data from that datasource. All these DLLs are managed by our internal nuget package sources.
Issue:
Now the console application runs fine and can load up the those DLLs. I copied across the logic into my web project and added the DLLs via nuget. Solution builds but got the following error when starting up the web project:
Could not load file or assembly 'ABC.DLL' or one of its dependencies. The specified module could not be found.
Where ABC.DLL is one of the third party DLLs.
I have done the following:
Confirm ABC.DLL is in the bin folder of my web project
Changed target build platform of my web project to be x86 and unchecked "Use 64 bit version of IIS Express for websites and project" setting in VS2015 (the third party dll is 32-bit)
Ran dumpbin.exe on ABC.DLL's dependency and got XYZ.dll,MSVCR120.dll,KERNEL32.dll,MSVCP120.dll,mscoree.dll
Regarding to the last step, those dlls were all missing in the bin folder (but the last 4 DLLs should be in system32 win directory so shouldn't matter?)
As for XYZ.dll, it is another third party library and is located on C:\Program Files (x86)\XYZ\ folder. I manually copied it across to the web project bin folder (in fact copied across all Dlls inside XYZ folder) and still get the same issue.
Questions
What am I missing here? The console app obviously can load ABC.DLL but the web project can't. Appreciate it if you can tell me what to check next.
The error message from start up web page is not very useful, is there a way to find out where the web project is trying to load the third party DLLs?
Thank you in advance!
Simply adding external DLLs to your Bin folder is not a great idea. Files can disappear from this folder for various reasons, such as your team members deleting a seemingly useless DLL, or through Visual Studio clearing it. Also, the output DLLs from referenced projects in your solution, would end up there, and are replaced every time you build your project.
What you should do for third-party DLLs, is create some "dependencies" folder in, or close to, your project, and stick the DLLs in there. Then you should right-click on the project, select Add Reference, browse to that new "dependencies" folder, and add a reference to the DLL that way. This is similar to the way NuGet works; it keeps DLLs in their respective folders inside the packages folder, and adds references to those DLLs.
I finally found the issue and thanks for all the help, I had to disable shadow copying in VS (mentioned in 64 bit managed assembly with unmanaged dependencies not loading in IIS / ASP.NET MVC 4).
I create an ASP.NET Webapp with Razor syntax in Visual Studio 2015, in C#.
I have to use 20 third party native c++ dll files (most of them for image handing, libtiff-5.dll, libpng16-16.dll, etc...).
Even when I manually copy those dll files into the bin folder, the app would not run. The error is:
Could not load file or assembly 'managedDllWrapper.DLL' or one of its dependencies. The specified module could not be found.
But according to almost all hints in the internet, copying to bin folder should work.
When I copy the dlls into the C:\Windows folder, the webapp runs perfectly, but only locally on my machine.
Also, when I create a C# Console app, instead of a webapp, copying into the bin folder works fine.
Why doesn't it work for a webapp? How can I import those dlls?
I cannot reference them into Visual Studio to the project, as they are not a valid COM assembly.
the dlls are not imported in the code with dllimport, as I don't know the specific functions they provide. A managed dll wrapper uses the dlls.
Any ideas? Thanks!
I did not solve the problem one to one, but I circumvented the problem successfully:
By rewriting the c#/c++ wrapper with explicit dllimport, I adressed the dll files directly with path. Then, the dependent dll just have to be in the same folder as the referenced dll. This works also in web apps.
An episerver installation puts the episerver assemblies in the GAC, I see them with C:/windows/assembly.
Besides, all the episerver dll's are present in C:/Program files/Episerver after an episerver installation.
When a create an episerver project via the episerver deployment center or with Visual Studio 2010 using the episerver template, I see that the bin-folder of the newly created project contains a lot of episerver-dlls, which is not very surprising. And I suppose that they are copied from C:/Program files/. If I open the project in visual studio, I see that it's those dll's that are referenced and not the ones from the GAC or from C:/program files/episerver.
Well, all of this is very confusing.
Why is Episerver putting dll's in the gac and not referencing them? What is the best way to handle references to episerver dll's for development in a team?
Moreover, IF episerver would reference the ddl's from the GAC, how would I see that in VS. I mean, what would the properties of the reference be?
Basically, this is all just episerver deployments decisions. I'll try and go over every your question one by one:
Putting dlls into GAC is useful when you want your users to access dlls in the reference dialog from ".NET Framework" tab. Suppose you're creating simple project (not episerver one) and want to add episerver dlls. Instead of looking for them on the hard drive you reference ones that are pointed from the GAC. That's easy for development.
Why not reference GAC dlls ? It's to easier deploy your solution with the dlls. Suppose you're deploying your solution to the server. Server won't be having episerver dlls in the GAC (and shouldn't have, anyway). So they're probably setting "copy local = true" property to copy the dlls into the output folder, making your solution portable. Also, the GAC assemblies aren't "referenced" - GAC just contains copies in a case of need and a reference is added to the "program files" folder with the dlls.
Best way for a development team is to use GAC or to define some kind of "Third Party"("externals") folder in the repository and put your dlls there (and reference from there). First approach requires episerver install on every dev machine, second uses up some space in your repository.
As GAC assemblies can't be referenced (they actually can be, but it's a headache), there is virtually no difference between the result - different paths only.
We usually create a separate directory where we store all .dll-files and reference them from that directory. This means all third party-librarys and episerver-dlls.
The biggest reason for doing this is to avoid a hassle when a new developer needs to setup the project, and also to avoid conflicts between different versions when referencing from GAC.
We have some DLLs in the bin folder. We build the DLLs in separate solutions and output to different directories. Now, when I build the web site, the DLLs in its bin folder gets updated automatically with the latest version (from those dirs). Now I am wondering how does that work? I mean, how did the build know from where to pull the latest bits of my DLLs? That looks magic to me...
When the website is getting build, the dlls will be copied to the target directory from the referenced location. Please check if the CopyLocal is set to True or False for each reference.
When building the web site, you must be referencing the DLLs from the other folder.
We have a main web application that references several other projects. Do you check-in .csproj/.sln files into source control? If so, do you use these files for msbuild or do you just include *.cs to build your dll? Does ILMerge help in any way with performance?
You should aim to check in everything that is needed so that someone can take a fresh install of Visual Studio, do a checkout, double-click the .sln file, build and be on their way.
.sln and .csproj are a no-brainer, in my opinion: what happens if you add a new file to the project: everybody would have to manually add the file to their project files if you didn't commit the .csproj file.
ILMerge - no. Not for web applications. Not for the rest either.
Checkin? What about letting visual studio handle it. Now, in general - source control without all relevant files is garbage ;) So, it should include stuff like the project and solution.