Visual Studio 2010 Compiling with the Debug or Release version of third party library depending on if my project is being compiled Build or Release?

I've downloaded a number of 3rd party libraries (dlls) now for Visual Studio 2010/C# and I've noticed that in their distributions \bin directory they usually have two versions Debug and Release.

Is there a way to 开发者_如何学JAVAadd these libraries as references to the project, but use the Release build (when I'm building a release), and use the Debug build (when I'm debugging)?

<Reference Include="MyLib">
   <HintPath>..\lib\$(Configuration)\MyLib.dll</HintPath>
</Reference>

You can edit the csproj file manually set the Condition attribute on the ItemGroup containing the reference.

  <ItemGroup Condition="'$(Configuration)' == 'Debug'">
    <Reference Include="MyLib">
      <HintPath>..\..\Debug\MyLib.dll</HintPath>
    </Reference>
  </ItemGroup>

  <ItemGroup Condition="'$(Configuration)' == 'Release'">
    <Reference Include="MyLib">
      <HintPath>..\..\Release\MyLib.dll</HintPath>
    </Reference>
  </ItemGroup>

See this article for a bit more information.

The answer by WaffleSouffle is definitely the best if you use a Release- and a Debug-folder, as the original question states.

There seems to be another option that is not so obvious because VS (VS2010) does not show it in the IntelliSense when editing the csproj-file.

You can add the condition to the HintPath-element. Like this:

<Reference Include="MyLib">      
      <HintPath Condition="'$(Configuration)'=='Release'">..\lib\MyLib.dll</HintPath>
      <HintPath Condition="'$(Configuration)'=='Debug'">..\lib\Debug\MyLib.dll</HintPath>
</Reference>

I found an article by Vivek Rathod describing the above approach at http://blog.vivekrathod.com/2013/03/conditionally-referencing-debug-and.html.

I checked the XMS Schema file for the project file at: C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\MSBuild\Microsoft.Build.Core.xsd and: C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\MSBuild\Microsoft.Build.Commontypes.xsd

I cannot see that Condition is a supported attribute for the HintPath-element, but it does seem to work.....

EDIT 1: This does not make the reference show up twice in Visual Studio which is an issue with the accepted answer.

EDIT 2: Actually, if you omit the HintPath alltogether Visual Studio will look in the projects output folder. So you can actually do this:

<Reference Include="MyLib">        
     <!-- // Removed HintPath, VS looks for references in $(OutDir) --> 
</Reference> 

The search order is specified in the file Microsoft.Common.targets
See: HintPath vs ReferencePath in Visual Studio

Yes, but probably not natively inside VS2010. You can edit the .csproj file and use Condition attributes to create the references to Release or Debug.

<Reference Include="MyLib" Condition=" '$(Configuration)|$(Platform)' == 'Debug|AnyCPU' ">
  <HintPath>..\lib\Debug\MyLib.dll</HintPath>
</Reference>

or

<Reference Include="MyLib" Condition=" '$(Configuration)|$(Platform)' == 'Release|AnyCPU' ">
  <HintPath>..\lib\Release\MyLib.dll</HintPath>
</Reference>