External Library Reference.

[Fr33dan]

Hi,
I have a currently have 2 C# projects that won't work together the way I want them to. One project is a library I've written and the other project is a application that uses it. In the future I will likely be writing more applications that will use the same library project.

My question is, Is there some way I can get the projects to reference a single copy of the DLL file from one of my projects?

Currently if I have the library project set up as a dependency I will get an output like this:

Program Files\Company\App1\App.exe
Program Files\Company\App1\Lib.dll
Program Files\Company\App2\App.exe
Program Files\Company\App2\Lib.dll

Ideally I'd like to get it to work more like this:

Program Files\Company\App1\App.exe
Program Files\Company\App2\App.exe
Program Files\Company\Lib.dll

I tried creating an Merge module deploy for the library thinking I could reference that instead of my actual project (Like some of the other libraries I'm using do) but I couldn't get it to look at the MSM output instead of the original.

[Plater]

I think you need to register the dll with windows or otherwise put it in some sort of global DLL list. How that is done, I don't know.
Perhaps the GAC(Global Assembly Cache) is the place to look.

[Fr33dan]

After a quick google search I found all the information I need about the GAC and changed my setup on the library to place it there.
My only issue now is that if I reference my library project in my app project the detected dependencies of the app setup project include the output from the library project (not the msm file created by the library setup project).

I can manually exclude those and include my .msm file in the app setup project but there it seems like there is a better way to do it.