ASP.NET and Visual Studio - Adding project references vs Bin Folder DLL

Question

I just started a new job yesterday and this is only my second job working in ASP.NET. We were setting up my dev box and were having trouble with some third party components like

Answer 1

We version control our 3rd party assemblies using Subversion, then pull them down via svn:externals into a sub-directory of the solution or project in question, which then references them (and copies into bin).

This provides quite a few benefits:

1. Build servers are happier, need less maintenance and are less brittle.
2. We have a history of releases and can explicitly control versioning for each solution/project by setting the revision number on each svn:external. For example your trunk code may be using latest Telerik version, but your release branches are using old versions.
3. We can share 3rd party assemblies for different projects, and be confident they are using the correct versions.
4. We're not relying on developers installing or upgrading to the correct version, yet they can still add and test new versions without interfering with other projects (assuming you have explicitly defined the revision)
5. We can test new versions, but easily go back if things don't work.

So a little more working setting things up, but I think it's worth it. Note that we don't version control (svn:ignore) our bin and obj directories, and the 3rd party assemblies are in the same Subversion repository, referenced by relative pathing.

FWIW: Subversion 1.6.6 fixes an annoying bug for file based svn:externals. This means you can choose one or more files (e.g. assemblies) from a directory instead of having to pull the whole directory down.

2013 Update

With the rise of NuGet, consider hosting your own feed via a local server before opting for using svn:externals, simply because it gives you all the same benefits, plus it's baked into Visual Studio via the Extension Manager and provides for better information and meta-data, e.g. being able to let developers know when there is a new release.

The only caveat would be to host your feed using a Win2008 or higher server, as I ran into some issues with our old Win2003 server using SSL with windows authentication to secure the feed. I believe this was due to the older version of IIS used in Win2003, but couldn't verify.