Project Reference Vs File Reference?

Question

References can be added in two ways in a project.

1. Project Reference.
2. File Reference.

But, When to use Project and when to use File refe

Answer 1

I just went through this...

We received, from a vendor, about 53 different VS2005 C# solution files that created 63 different project .dlls, all of which are called by a separate, commercial application.

All projects contained file references to the dlls of the other projects.

The problems with this approach were great: inter-solution dependencies were almost impossible to work out, involving a lot of "findstr" commands; the "find definition" functionality of VS would not find the source for file-referenced dlls, it would only show the definitions of the functions inside the dlls; re-building because of changes was error-prone, cumbersome, and involved opening many different solutions to re-build the entire dll set.

I spent weeks combining the 53 different solution files into one, then spent additional time changing all file dependencies to project dependencies. Now, when you "find definition" you're taken to a source file. Now, when you change a low-level project all of the dependent projects will build when you build the (one) solution.

I made a few additional changes, but the handiest was setting all of the separate projects' build directories to solutiondir/bin. That way, all dlls end up in one place.

Oh, yes: I also set 'copy local' to 'no' for all of the referenced projects' dlls. That way, each dll shows up in solutiondir/bin as the project is built and is found by the next projects to build.

The only problem we have now is that if I change a project that is used as a datasource for another project with a Windows Form then the Windows Form will not open in Designer until I re-build the project that is the datasource for the form. A small, small price to pay for all of the benefits of project references. Also, I have to build the solution upon checkout from svn because the dlls aren't in svn. In the above case the datasource .dll isn't there for Designer to find.