Visual Studio 2008 doesn't create *.refresh files for external DLL references... what am I missing?

Posted by Cory Larson on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Cory Larson
Published on 2010-03-24T14:51:20Z Indexed on 2010/03/24 14:53 UTC
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Hi all-- I've got a question about something that's just been irritating me.

A colleague and I are building a support framework for our current client that we want to reference in other projects.

The DLL we want as a reference in our project would be an external reference. We're adding it by doing "Add Reference...", then browsing to the location of the .dll. What I want Visual Studio to do is only add the .xml, .pdb, and a .dll.refresh file, but instead it copies the actual .dll (and .xml and .pdb) into the bin.

When we rebuild the framework project, the other project that uses its .dll gets all out of whack until we drop and re-add the reference. Everything I've read online says that VS2008 is supposed to create the .dll.refresh files for you, but it never does.

Any ideas? Am I missing something or doing something wrong?

At this point I'm ready to add a pre-build event to simply copy the framework .dll into my bin, but the .refresh file seems like less of a hassle if it would just work.

Thanks,

Cory

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