If you are like me and you have a similar problem of having to share common in-house library code between various Visual studio solutions and you are using SVN for your source code control, then SVN Externals might be a good option to consider.
In my scenario, I had a class library which contains a lot of utility classes that are shared amongst different applications I write. Before starting a new project, I would typically create a Solution Items / bin folder in the solution directory of the new project and would place the compiled library dll in this folder which gets checked into SVN repo along with the application code. This approach sort of worked but had the following pain points:
- Before starting a new project, I had to get the latest version of the library code from the repo. Compile it and grab the dll and place it in the solution items folder of the new project.
- When I added more functionality to the library code, the existing solutions could not benefit from it.
- I could not debug the library code from within the application solution, unless i used Reflector Pro to decompile the library.
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