What does Visual Studio 2008 do when I add an assembly reference?

Question

When I add a reference to an assembly (living in the GAC) to web.config in an ASP.NET project, what does Visual Studio do?

[This is related to an earlier question pertaining to BusinessObjects: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2379615/ ]

When I add "CrystalDecisions.Enterprise" and "CrystalDecisions.Enterprise.Framework" to the assemblies element in web.config, VS thinks long and hard about it, locking me out for a couple of minutes while it scrutinizes the newcomers.

What is it doing during this time? I Googled this but came up empty.

I can make some educated guesses (IntelliSense integration, perhaps?) but would ideally like to find some documentation describing exactly what's going on.

Ultimately I'm hoping to learn why these BO references are making VS take several minutes to open my projects (I struck out on the SAP forums).

Answer 1

I can't help you directly with finding documentation but Visual Studio will need to load these assemblies into memory and navigate the assembly structure for many different things, such as Intellisense population, Object Browser, etc. It will also have to potentially load other GAC items that those assemblies depend upon into memory and do similar things.