referencing 32 assemblies on a 64 bit windows dev box

Question

I and my co-developer have installed Microsoft Expression studio 3.

I set a reference to the new mediaplayer and checked in my project. The co-dev get the project from TFS and can't do a build because of missing references.

Odd I said --- until I realized that I was running on a 64 bit environment and he was not. This means that Expression installed into the "program files (x86)" folder on my machine and on his machine it's "Program files"

So how is it suppose to work, if we have the thing we are referencing (Expression in this case or anything for that matter) installed in different locations?

Note this is VS2008.

Answer 1

Have you hard coded the path to Expression as "X:\Program Files (x86)\..."? If so, try using "%ProgramFiles%\..." instead.

As long as the program expanding the environment variable (your build tool) is 32-bit, %ProgramFiles% will expand to 'X:\Program Files' on a 32-bit OS and to 'X:\Program Files (x86)' on a 64-bit OS.

Answer 2

What I typically do when I reference external assemblies is to first copy them into a common folder that is also checked in to your version control system. This way all developers have the same DLLs they need to compile with.