Updating a reference in certain projects of a solution

Question

Having a big solution containing tens of projects seems to get hard to maintain. I need to update packages in some of these projects, but I do not want to touch them in all projects.

Say for example, I want to update Entity Framework to version 6 in one class library project, but let the remaining projects keep using an older version. But since another project will need to call both projects using EF5 and EF6, will this even be possible?

Also, is it somehow possible to modularize class libraries so that they have their own dependencies, but do not make callers of these libraries dependent on the libraries dependencies? (Normally I need to add references to the dependency in both calling project, and in the project actually using the dependency directly). I pretty much want to make this class library a black box. The calling code shouldn't need to know what the black box does. And shouldn't need to add 10 different google api dll's to be able to use it.

Answer 1

Consider ILMerge ? ILMerge can combine multiple DLLs to a single library, meaning that you can package any dependancies with your DLL.

I can't give you usage advice however, I don't have firsthand experience.