how to use extension methods across many projects .

Question

i am learning extension method, a very handy feature, which can save number of hours of coding, provides reusability. what i'm doing now a days, daily i'm creating 10 extension methods which useful in day to day scenario. but i'm not getting how to use these extension methods, everytime we need to add dll and reference it. or is there any smart way where we can use .

suppose

 public static bool isValidMail(this string str)
        {
            Regex reg = new Regex(@"^[\w-\.]+@([\w-]+\.)+[\w-]{2,4}$");
            return reg.IsMatch(str);
        }

if i created 100 extension methods like this , then for every project should i need to reference this static class dll. as i work with multplie projects. is there any way that we can put these extension methods in centralized location or some assembly cache, where we can easily add using statement and get access to all static methods.

can we do like this ?

1. whenever we do create new project, can VS automatically add the extensionmethods which we created, so that in evey project we can access it. rather than adding dll everytime

2. i want to know how you people do. i hope no one down votes it, just curious abt implementation of extension methods

Answer 1

It sounds like you should have a single project containing related extension methods - and then yes, you'll need to add a reference to that project from every project which needs it. That's a one-time cost. You could put it in the GAC, but personally I wouldn't - just treat it as another class library you need to depend on, like any other.

Answer 2

1. You could change the VS 2010 Project Templates to include a "Framework" DLL automatically. visual studio templates

2. I simply keep a common repository of various common dll's and reference the ones I need, this is in SVN as well, I then have specific Snippets for each Framework I have created to make it easy to insert commonly used code.