Reference DLLs in ASP.NET without \Bin or GAC

Question

I have an ASP.NET project under source control (Subversion). For various reasons, I don\'t want to add the \\Bin directory or its contents to source control, so I have it sv

Answer 1

If you are doing any kind of serious development I would recommend migrating away from the web site project and to a web project as this allows you to manage these kind of dependencies in the same manner across your entire solution.

However, assuming you cannot do that, place all of the assemblies that you need to reference from the web project into a folder somewhere ( e.g. lib\web ) and add a pre-build event to your web project that copies the content of that folder into the bin folder of the web directory. Now whenever you want to add a dependency to your web project you can drop it in the lib\web folder, and add the reference. Whenever you build, all of the referenced assemblies will be copied into the folder so you can delete the bin folder or do a clean checkout and not have any issue.