How to associate external files with an assembly

Question

Let's say you have a class library project that has any number of supplemental files that also need to be included with the compiled assembly (e.g. simple text files or even a legacy unmanaged DLL that's wrapped by the assembly as an interop layer). While embedding the supplemental files into the assembly itself is relatively straightforward, we have situations where this is not possible or just undesirable. We need to have them as "sidecar" files (i.e. files alongside the assembly, potentially in subdirectories relative to the assembly)

Adding those files to the project with an appropriate value for "Copy to Output Directory" specified appears to be sufficient for projects that are completely self-contained within a solution. But if a separate project in another solution adds a reference to the assembly, it does not automatically pickup its sidecar files. Is there a way in the project to somehow mark the resulting assembly such that anything referencing the assembly will also know it needs to include the associated sidecar files? How do you do this?

Answer 1

Have you tried creating a setup for your solution ? There's an option of including sidecar files targeting to application installation directory.

Another option would be to include the sidecar files in the Assembly resources and un-wrap them to disk when run for the first time.

Answer 2

Unfortunately there doesn't appear to be a lot of built-in support in Visual Studio for this, although I can definitely see the use case.

If you use Subversion for your source control, then you could link in an external reference as an externals definition. This would bring in the source code, and you'd be making a reference to the necessary assembly as a project reference instead of a DLL reference, and then the copy to output directory rules would come into play.

If that's not possible, another solution would be to include commands in the pre/post-build events of your in-solution project to copy the most up-to-date sidecar files from the remote assembly on a build. Of course this comes with the caveat that it doesn't set itself up automatically when you include the DLL in your project; you have to take manual steps to set it up.

Answer 3

You can use al.exe, but there also appears to be a C# compiler option. You want to create a multifile assembly using the /linkresource C# compiler option. Instructions are here, but the command is similar to this:

csc /linkresource:N.dll /t:library A.cs

Where N.dll is a native DLL that will go wherever the managed assembly goes (including into the GAC.) There's a very clear description at the link I provided.

Answer 4

I deal with this some time ago. Its a common problem.

You can create some postbuild actions:

http://www.codingday.com/execute-batch-commands-before-or-after-compilation-using-pre-build-or-post-build-events/

Hope this helps... :)

Answer 5

It appears to me that you're using the wrong type of reference. There are two types of references- Reference and ProjectReference. Reference is an explicit reference to a specific assembly. ProjectReference is a reference to another project (say .csproj).

What you're looking for is ProjectReference. VS and the default MSBuild targets are setup to do CopyLocal. If you set CopyToOutputPath true for your "sidecar" files, any ProjectReferences to this project now will also pull in the same files.

I'm not sure if you can to ProjectReferences across solutions in the IDE. I deal a lot with MSBuild where sln files are not relevant and this is how I deal with it.

Answer 6

What we did in our project is that we created as separate build file to do all those stuffs.

In your build file you can have tags to build your main solution, then add tags to copy files you need after build.

NAnt is also your option, but right now I'm happy using Rake as my build/debug automation.

Since this cannot be integrated within Visual Studio, what I'm doing is I create a task (either in MSBuild, NAnt or Rake), that executes vsjitdebugger.exe in the end to attach it to my Visual Studio when debugging.

These are just my styles for now, you can maybe create your own style.

Answer 7

What if you create a merge module containing the library plus its dependencies? Your installer will then need to reference this module, but you will ensure all of the necessary files will be present.