Best practice to share common libraries between solutions in .NET

Question

We have pool of MSVS solutions (Solution \"A\", \"B\", \"C\", ... ) that share basic functionality in assembly called \"Common.dll\".

There are 3-5 active solutions (th

Answer 1

We practice something mostly like B.

A CI server makes sure that the common libraries are always up-to-date (even if they use other common libraries themselfes). Each solution which uses common libraries has a "Lib" folder where we put the build artefacts, but these are not under source control (in contrast to external artefacts, such as the ones imported though NuGet).

So while developing you don't get problems because of breaking changes in the common libs and the developer chooses the point in time when he upgrades (but he always has to do that before he commits to the central repo).

The CI server will always copy the latest common libraries into the "Lib" of the solution under build, so that the latest common libraries are integrated. If we need to create a build with old libraries (specific hotfix release - very rare), we can always use the build artefacts with the matching date. Normal patch/fix releases are usually also upgraded to the latest common libraries though.