Visual Studio Hacks

Master Assembly and Project References #2

Chapter 1, Master Projects and Solutions

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11

HACK

HACK

#2

Master Assembly and Project References Hack #2

Visual Studio uses references to identify the external assemblies that your

project relies on. How these references are used depends on the type of

reference as well as a number of other factors.

Adding a reference to a project is a simple matter of right-clicking on the ref-

erences folder of a project and selecting Add Reference. (Add Web Refer-

ence is a completely different feature that is used for creating a reference to a

web service and won’t be covered here.)

The Add Reference dialog contains a number of tabs, three in Visual Stu-

dio .NET 2002 and 2003 and five in Visual Studio 2005. Figure 1-11 shows

the Visual Studio .NET 2003 Add Reference dialog.

The .NET tab contains a list of .NET assemblies. You can select any of these

assemblies and create a reference to that assembly. The COM tab contains a

list of all the registered COM objects that you can reference. The Projects

tab contains a list of all the projects in your solution, and by selecting one,

you can create a reference directly to that project.

Visual Studio 2005’s Add Reference dialog is shown with its extra tabs

(Browse and Recent) in Figure 1-12.

The Browse tab is used to browse for an assembly from the filesystem—the

same as the Browse button from the Add Reference dialog of older versions ...