Resolving circular depenency

Question

I have two class projects in a Visual Studio solution. Due to the nature of th project both projects reference each other because they need each other's services (think of the "I scratch your back, you scratch mine" phrase).

Visual Studio (2010) won't let me add a reference to project b from project a, because project a already references project b.

What strategies are there to resolve this circular dependency?

Thanks

Answer 1

There are two typical approaches you can use:

1) Combine both projects into a single project.

2) Find the common parts of the two projects and factor them out into a separate third project.

Answer 2

Refactor the independent services (those not dependent on the other projects) to a third class library and have both projects reference this third one.

On the other hand, if the two projects are so tightly coupled, then you should also considering combining them into a single project.