C# web project, where do all dependencies come from?

Question

Hi Folks, Strangest thing happened today with my ASP.NET MVC project. I built the installer project this afternoon, and all of a sudden, there were all these new dependencies! Yuck.

Microsoft.SqlServer.BatchParser.dll
Microsoft.SqlServer.ConnectionInfo.dll
Microsoft.SqlServer.Dmf.dll
Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Sdk.Sfc.dll
Microsoft.SqlServer.ServiceBrokerEnum.dll
Microsoft.SqlServer.Smo.dll
Microsoft.SqlServer.SqlClrProvider.dll
Microsoft.SqlServer.SqlEnum.dll
Microsoft.VisualStudio.QualityTools.UnitTestFramework.dll
Microsoft.VisualStudio.TeamSystem.Data.dll
Microsoft.VisualStudio.TeamSystem.Data.UnitTesting.dll
Microsoft.Web.Mvc.dll

This is in addition to the normal dependencies (I want these)...

Microsoft.Web.Mvc.dll
System.Web.Abstractions.dll
System.Web.Mvc.dll
System.Web.Routing.dll

Any idea what I could have done to cause these new dependencies to show.

Answer 1

To be honest, I do not have any idea of setup projects.

But looks like your solution has some kind of database project (or database unit test project). You might need to exclude it from the list of things to build & deploy.

Answer 2

Well here we go:

Microsoft.Web.Mvc.dll is for experimental features of the MVC framework that probably won't make it into the final release

Microsoft.VisualStudio.QualityTools.UnitTestFramework.dll, Microsoft.VisualStudio.TeamSystem.Data.dll, Microsoft.VisualStudio.TeamSystem.Data.UnitTesting.dll are probably there because you selected to include Unit Tests in your project when you first created it.

Microsoft.SqlServer.*.dll are probably there because you used an attached database file, or LINQ to SQL classes (I'm assuming you have some form of data access for your models, right?) This is quite odd, since these are not usually necessary for data access only.

If you do not want these dependencies, you can try to exclude them from your deployment project one by one until something breaks (right click on the dependency in solution explorer and choos Exclude Dependency). Sometimes the VS deployment tools are just a little overzealous with the dependency checking.