DLL references when using TFS 2010

Question

I am new to using TFS 2010 and was wondering the best way to add references (.e.g. AjaxControlToolKit, etc) to projects that I have added to TFS source control.

Would having the references be pointed to a shared folder on the network and being pulled from there be good solution? or is there a better way to achieve such things.

I have only ever used VSS with .NET stuff however have limited experience with svn/mercurial

Also - I would like to learn how to use TFS properly - does anyone have any useful guides or recommended reading? There are 5 developers in our company who have never had much 'proper' industry experience with team collaboration - however two of us are familiar with SCRUM and agile from university and would like to adopt this methodology.

Answer 1

What we do at the company where I work is to place the dll in a solution folder (often named libraries or similar) and add them to the solution. That way they are added to source control automatically.

I'd recommend keeping dlls in each solution rather than a common share for all projects as different solutions may have dependencies on different versions of a dll. That being said, there's nothing to keep you from checking in all versions of all dlls you use in a common place in source control and then branch them into the projects where they are used.

Hope that helps.

Edit: 2011-10-05

Since I've been getting some upvotes for this one I thought I'd fill you in on some small changes we are currently considering.

We are now considering setting up a private NuGet stream for the company and set up NuGet packages for each library or group of libraries. By including the packages.config file in source control we let NuGet do the work of getting the correct files. Instead of merging from the source whenever a new version of a library comes out, we just release a new version of the NuGet package.

In case some of the developers don't have NuGet installed it's supposed to be possible to include nuget.exe somehow and still get this setup to work.