Is it possible to add a reference to an existing application

Question

I am using WinForms and MS Access to develop a solution. During the planning stages it has become clear that there are actually three separate apps, two main apps, and one smaller app that will be used to maintain and store some data which is then used by the other two.

Rather than the just access the common data from the main apps by querying the smaller app's database I was thinking about exposing methods via an interface in the smaller app that can then be used by the larger ones, kinda like an api.

My question is, is this possible? Maybe by adding a reference to an already deployed app? Are there any best practices around this, what would happen if a new version of the smaller app is deployed, would that break the reference?

I've done some research on this but can only find info related to web services or creating common library dlls / frameworks which is something I'm familiar with, but I think this is a slightly different scenario.

I'd very much appreciate any guidance / advice,

Cheers,

Jamie

Answer 1

Yes, it's possible, but you should create library inseted app for common using. Then this is library can be added as reference to any application.