Find all references of a dll in a project

Question

In Visual Studio 2010 (or 2012) is there a way to locate all references in code that mention any class/method defined in a referenced dll.

Currently I have two processes that I use (depending on the situation):

• The first one involves just deleting the dll reference from the project and then making a note of all the build error locations.
• The other way is to open the reference in the Object Browser and then expand to it's namespaces, and for each namespace I do a manual search, but this doesn't always help find all references and because the legacy code has the same namespaces spanning multiple assemblies there's a lot of noise to filter through.

Neither of these are really ideal solutions, is there any easier way to do this? perhaps via a VS extension.

Answer 1

You can find this if you install Resharper:

Expand the References and choose Find code Dependent on Module

The results then appear like:

Answer 2

Don't have Resharper, but you do have Sublime Text?

in Sublime Text, select 'open folder', and select the folder containing the solution. Then select menu item Find -> Find in Files...

In the 'Where:' field, enter:

*.scsproj

Then in the 'Find:' field, search for the string

Include="[full namespaced name of library]"

for example:

Include="System.Xml.Linq"

will find all projects that reference the System.Xml.Linq dll in the solution.