Visual Studio 2008 - Add Reference

Question

When adding a DLL as a reference to an ASP.Net project, VS2008 adds several files to the bin directory. If the DLL is called foo.dll, VS2008 adds foo.dll.refresh, foo.pdb and f

Answer 1

The refresh file (since no one's hit on that yet!) describes where the DLL came from. This is for auto-refresh references; whenever you do a full build, VS will look in that path and copy that version of the DLL.

Why is this a good thing (sometimes)? Let's say you're in a team environment. Someone checks in code for foo.dll, and your build system builds a new DLL, outputting it in a file share on a server. Your refresh file points to that server copy of the DLL. Next time you build, VS will auto-magically grab the latest and greatest copy of that DLL.