Visual Studio：自动参考清理？

Question

Is there any way of finding out what assemblies that's not used in a solution and have them removed automatically? (Just like when removing unneeded using-statements.)

Side note:

Wouldnt it be nice if it was possible to have an algorithm/program to automatically go through all code in a large solution to try to find the optimal way of refactoring it to get a more logical/managable set of projects thats has as few references to each other and other assemblies as possible?

Yes I know this should have been done from the beginning and maintained throughout the project. But all information to do this is available to the computer so it should be possible for it to do this for us. At least give us hints about some good alternatives. I havent researched this much but there may allready be solutions for this? Do anyone know? ReSharper cant to this I guess?

Answer 1

The question is mighty broad.

However, if you know what you are trying to achieve, NDepend is a tool that will greatly assist your work

NDepend is relatively good at detecting dependency, connected components and has a highly sophisticated Query Language to find certain patterns (or pattern violations).

I'd then apply Resharper to actually perform the most refactorings.

Edit In response to edited question: to clean unneeded references, you might use Resharper in any of the following ways:

1. per reference, Find Dependent Code and if no results are found, remove the reference.
2. just remove them all and let Resharper suggest which ones you needed ( Alt + Enter )