For the last few years I've used a fairly standard way of handling 3rd party
assemblies.
In source control, I create a folder called "3rd Party Assemblies" which is
where I put all the external references (like nSubstitues, Ninject, etc.).
/DavidSolution
DavidSolution.sln
/3rdPartyAssemblies
/nSubstitue
/Ninject
/...
/Project1
/Project 2
/...
It works well, learnt it from Mitch years ago. However something that has
always tripped me up, is how do you handle assembiles that are installed on
the computer?
Here I am thinking of *Telerik, Component art, DevExpress,* and most other
purchased libraries.
At the moment I am using Telerik, you need to install it onto your machine
and it puts the license file somewhere.
We have a number of devs working on the same project, so we all install the
tools on.
Now when it comes to building, i'll need to install the tools into the build
server. Whenever a new version comes out, i'll need to get everyone to
update the computers and if they forget, then people are out of sync, or
they could be working on 3 different projects and their other projects may
not be upgraded yet.
If I copy all the Telerik controls that I need into the 3rd Party Assembly
folder, then when I upgrade my version of Telerik I can just copy the new
.dlls into the 3rd party assembly folder, and all other devs will
automatically pull down those .dlls with a get latest. and hopefully the
build server will work with them just in the 3rd party assembly folder, but
there might be a license issue?
Putting the .dlls into the 3rd party assembiles folder seems like a good
idea to make sure that the project is on a specific version of the tools.
BUT then you lose some other features like having Telerik automatic
migration your solution references to the latest version of the assemblies.
*So to sum up my question:*
With the libraries that you need to install (Telerik, Component Art,
DevExpress). How do you guys handle the assembly references? Include in
source control, install the framework on EVERY computer? or some other
solution?
-David Burela
