Team Build 2010 - Third Party Assembly References not copying to output folder

Question

When I build a solution on my build server it generates a binaries folder and then later on copies these binaries to the final output folder. In my case some of the third party

Answer 1

In some cases you need assemblies that you don't have as references to be copied, if that's the case see: Visual Studio Package build and DLLs in private bin path

If the above is not the case, check that all references you want copied have the property Copy Local: True.

Answer 2

For ASP.NET projects there is a built in mechanism for this. Ensure required assemblies are in a folder under your project named _bin_deployableAssemblies and they will get automatically copied. To see how this customization is wired into the build of Web projects, find the file...

%PROGRAMFILES%\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v10.0\WebApplications\Microsoft.WebApplication.targets

And take a look at the _CopyBinDeployableAssemblies target. In that same file you can see it referenced like this...

<PropertyGroup>
  <PrepareForRunDependsOn>
    $(PrepareForRunDependsOn);
    CopySilverlightApplications;
    _CopyBinDeployableAssemblies;
  </PrepareForRunDependsOn>
  ...

You can do a similar customization on any project, since the target PrepareForRun is part of the common MSBuild targets in Visual Studio.

Answer 3

Please do one thing, add the third party dlls to your bin folder and give reference to that dll in the bin folder.

Then build the solution and commit the results. This will copy the third party dlls in the bin folder.