Auto-refresh references in Visual Studio

Question

Consider the following:

I have a .NET 3.5 project that uses a .NET 1.1 dll. When I copy the 1.1 dll into the location referenced by the 3.5 project, the 3.5 project will not compile until I close out Visual Studio and reopen the project. I think this is related to refreshing the reference to the 1.1 dll but I'd like a setting to auto-refresh the references. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

Have you tried using a .refresh file? Here is a snippet from Microsoft's documentation:

In Visual Studio .NET, referenced assemblies (for example, assemblies that are referenced outside of the solution in which the Web project is located) could have the CopyLocal property set to true, which would automatically update the referenced assembly. In Visual Studio 2005, this behavior is replaced by creating a refresh file in the Bin folder. The refresh file contains the path to the external referenced assembly and has the extension .refresh appended to the assembly name.

Sounds like it would solve your problem. Also, have you tried just setting "CopyLocal" to false for the assembly that isn't updating.