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

Usually I just drop them in the bin, unless it is part of something that isn't that simple. Sitecore for example installs itself and has a couple of folders that it likes to use for putting some of its own code to give an example of something non-trivial.