Visual Studio Setup Project - Detected Dependencies

Question

i have an issue with the old setup projects in VS2010. please don't blame me for using that. it's a company decision which cannot be changed. poor enough i HAVE to deal with it.

i think it's quite usual what we got: a solution with some projects. the projects reference assemblies. some of them are 3rd party components. they are ALL referenced to/from the SAME individual folder (NOT the GAC or something like C:\\Programs...). we just don't reference the installed versions. we want to keep them all in one place.

here comes the point... the project itself points to the folder we want. building and running is fine. when i examine the setup project, SOME of the 3rd party assemblies are taken from our specific folder, others are taken from C:\\Programs...

i just don't know why. i cannot influence this as it seems. even manually editing the .vdproj file ( were "GAC:FALSE" can be set) doesn't help! we need to reference the specific *.dlls in our folder.

has anyone an idea on this? i haven't found something so far...

cheers! jens

Answer 1

This is how VS behaves. Even though you told him to search for your 3rd party dlls in your own folder, if it finds the same dll in GAC, it will reference it from there. On computers that do not have the dll in the GAC, it will reference it from your folder. In other words, if the computer you deploy your application has all the 3rd party assemblies in the folder that you referenced them from, and the folder exists on the target machine, the application will not crash, even if the dlls are not in the destination you see on your own machine, and will use the assemblies from the folder.

Answer 2

Maybe somebody fiddled with the default reference paths in Visual Studio. If you look at this article, about half-way through it explains the registry keys that are used to locate referenced assemblies:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/wkze6zky(v=vs.100).aspx

I think that the VS search mechanism will go through this list at build time, and you may end up with a rather strange combination, especially if some assemblies have dependencies on others and the assembly versions are different. So if you start with a certain assembly that requires others with a particular version it will chase that list of directories until it finds them.

I don't believe it is correct that VS will get assemblies from the GAC by default for reference purposes. The .NET runtime will do this when you run the program, but at dev time all the MS assemblies, for example, are referenced from the SDK install, not from the GAC. The GAC is a repository for running programs that require those assemblies, not a reference for dev builds.