What is the best way to make shared libraries available to multiple applications?

Question

Like most shops we've got a team of people working on various projects that all need to access the same core information and functions that relate to our business, usually in C#. We're currently just copying common classes from project to project, but everyone is starting to have their own flavors and we want to consolidate.

We use Tortoise SVN and have decided to maintain a separate project to contain our common classes, but are not sure the best way to deploy this common code to our various applications. We work for an internal IT shop that can dictate everything about how the users access the applications, we don't have to worry about releasing our products into the real world.

Some of our thoughts have been:

1. Compile the classes into a single DLL and load it into the Global Assembly Cache (GAC)
2. Compile the classes into a single DLL and save it to a centrally located shared drive to be referenced by all other projects
3. Compile the classes into a single DLL and include it in each project
4. Just fetch the most recent classes when starting a project, but don't have a central shared library (our interpretation of this: http://www.yosefk.com/blog/redundancy-vs-dependencies-which-is-worse.html)
5. SVN Externals http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.0/ch07s03.html

I know this is a common problem, and if you spend any time looking into these or other options, you invariably find people explaining the pitfalls of each method (versioning, regression testing, "DLL Hell", "The GAC sucks", etc). I can hardly find anyone talking about what WORKS and why. Is there a preferred method?

Answer 1

At my company we have the same issue. Currently, we just use .bat files that go to our SVN Trunk and pull the most recent .dll references and fill a local References folder for the project you are working on.

However, we are currently working on switching this system over to NuGet. I'm not 100% sure how it works, but it's definitely worth looking into. Looks like you can set it up to where you can point it to a shared code repository, and then in Visual Studio using a plugin, it's as simple as just right clicking and hitting 'Update' everytime you need to get the newest code.