How can I avoid publishing the library folder in a Web Publish?

Question

I have moved binary files into the project under the bin folder to avoid publishing the same binary files twice since one of the binaries is huge; ie 15MB.

This was originally in a separate Includes folder. So the files were being copied twice to the publish folder.

Is the bin folder the correct placement for these or are there other steps I should take?

Edit: Sorry if I gave a poor explanation (and original title). I've changed the title; this was "Where should static libraries (3rd party DLLs) be kept in Visual Studio?", and is now, "How can I avoid publishing the library folder in a Web Publish?"

As mentioned, I originally had a separate folder named Includes . When I did a Web Publish, each of the DLLs are published twice; one into the bin folder, the other into the Includes folder. In this case, I am publishing at least an extra 15MB of unnecessary file space. Normally, not a big deal but if I am on a very slow connection, I'll need to wait longer to deploy the project to its environment.

I moved the DLLs back into a separate folder but the folder is still published along with the bin output folder. I did this to see if the placement of these files would set their properties differently.

I have tried various settings for Build Action and other property settings for these libraries without success.

Is there no way around publishing the DLLs twice?

Answer 1

If these files are part of the overall source of the system (not necessarily as source code, but as source-control-tracked artifacts nonetheless), then you probably don't want to keep them in the output folder for the build. The output folder should be transient and shouldn't be tracked in source control.

Keep 3rd party libraries in a library folder. The folder structure in source control might look something like this:

/
--/lib
--/Project1
----/SomeSubFolder
--/Project2
----/Images
----/Styles

and so on.

Each Project would have its own bin folder when it gets compiled, which itself may contain other folders for types of compilation (Release, Debug, etc.). But you don't want those build artifacts tracked in source control or in any way interfering with what's in source control.

The projects would reference their library dependencies, and at build time those dependencies would be copied to the output folder to be used by the application runtime.