Why are circular references in Visual Studio a bad practice?

Question

Why are circular references in Visual Studio a bad practice?

First, I will describe an example of how this can happen using C# in Visual Studio, since VS will typi

Answer 1

circular dependencies are bad because:

• project A references project B
• when project B changes, project A needs to be rebuilt
• now if project B also references project A
• then when one of them changes, the other one needs to be rebuilt
• which causes the other one to need to be rebuilt
• which causes the other one to need to be rebuilt
• etc.

this is potentially an infinite-loop in the build process

Answer 2

If you're having trouble convincing your "pragmatic" colleagues that this is a bad practice, offer a pragmatic solution: Remove these circular references and build times will go down since loads of unnecessary rebuilding will be avoided.