References, Copy Local. Third party controls.

[Claire]

In our application we've used several 3rd party windows form controls that
were installed into their own individual directories.

We have to avoid using the GAC, all our dlls should be found together in the
main application directory.

I'm just reading through the many projects and references that make up our
solution. Some of the dlls in the references are set to "Copy Local", others
are not. (We can handle that Windows system dlls should be shared and
therefore "Copy Local" is set to false)
If we want to make sure that NONE of our dlls are installed into/run from
the GAC do we set all references to Copy Local? Is that OK for 3rd party
packages too?

thanks

 

[Joe Mayo]

Hi Claire,

It depends because there are a couple items to consider on 3rd party DLLs.
If you do XCopy deployment, then you want to set CopyLocal to true.
However, if you use the built-in VS.NET Setup wizard, it will recognize that
it needs to grab a copy of those DLLs, even if their CopyLocal is set to
false. If it is an ASP.NET project, and you are using the Copy Project
option from the Project menu, you should set CopyLocal to true.

On DLLs that belong to your solution, you should have project references,
rather than file references, which sets CopyLocal to true automatically for
you.

Joe