Best Practices - Versioning Referenced Assemblies

[emarthinsen]

Hi. I posted this several months back, but I didn't get any replies. I thought I'd post it again to see if anyone has any new ideas and/or recommendations.


Hello-

I'm trying to find the best solution for versioning referenced third-party controls in a VS.NET project. Right now, I have four ideas:

1. Have the project reference a copy of the controls present in the bin folder.

2. Create a new project that gets added to the solution that only contains third-party controls.

3. Put all of the third-party controls in a network share folder with versions controlled separately from my main solution.

4. Create a new folder in my project called "ThirdPartControls" and reference the assemblies in that.

I'm leaning towards number 4, but my research has only just begun. Does anyone have any guidance? Is this a solved problem?

Regards-
Eric

[dan]

We don't really have any guidelines for this, because, as you've noted, there are lots of ways to do it, and a lot of it is personal preference for how you want to build your product. Perhaps other Vault customers can chime in here with how they handle 3rd party apps.

[ismangil]

5. Create a separate folder called ThirdParty, checked in Vault, with subfolders for each thirdparty dll. If necessary create a further subfolder for each version, if you anticipate multiple versions of the 3rd party controls will be used, by multiple projects.

Projects should use file-based references to this folder.

Also add the dlls to the Solution level as a solution item. This will be easier for developers because if they do "Open Solution from Source Control" it will also bring down the ThirdPary folder, so recompilation should be straightforward.