storing Interop AxInterop dlls in source control

Question

Hi all,

I have recently inherited a C# .NET solution in VS 2008, .NET framework 3.5, with many 3rd party dependencies including several on COM dlls. I checked out the latest from the source control system and found I had to generate the Interop, AxInterop dlls in Visual Studio (adding references and adding them to the Toolbox and dragging them onto a dialog) for them to be properly referenced in the project and registered. From that process it seems to work ok but the project is referencing these dlls in the /obj area which isn't in source control.

I was wondering, and maybe this is not sensible, is there a way you can create these AxInterop/Interop dlls and submit them to source control such that if I wanted to check out the solution onto a new computer I wouldn't have to recreate these files (because they are stored in the obj area). I'd like to avoid having the obj area in source control because of all the other unnecessary files in it.

I tried copying the dlls to a source controled directory and creating references to these (AX)interop dlls but that creates a slightly different version of the dlls which causes other issues (e.g. errors saying a component isn't registered).

I hope that makes sense and thanks for any help!

Answer 1

the Toolbox and dragging them onto a dialog)....

Seems like your build process is currently dependent on the GUI. Removing this dependency should help you a lot.

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Since you have to create these dll files and the process works its better you add these files to source control. I am not sure why you are adverse to adding the obj folder to version control. Even if there are temporary files getting created in the directory how does that going to affect your version controlled files?