TFS and referenced assemblies

I have a project which is under source control using TFS. Actually, I have 2 solution in one TFS Collection. suppose t开发者_运维知识库he first solution is called SolutionA, while the second SolutionB. Each solution has it's own project in TFS. Now the problem I have is that, one of SolutionB's project should reference an assembly which is build in SolutionA. So what's best practices to achieve this?

Thanks

You have SolutionA that contains ProjectA, and SolutionB that contains ProjectB:

The two easiest approaches you can use for referencing ProjectA from ProjectB are:

• Simply add ProjectA to SolutionB, and then ProjectB can use a project-reference to ProjectA. This means that you share the source code for ProjectA and make an independent build of it from within SolutionB as well as SolutionA. This will slightly slow down your SolutionB build (as you now always build ProjectA in it), but will allow you to make edits to the source code for ProjectA, and treat it as a normal part of SolutionB.

• Build SolutionA and use a post-build step (or redirect the output path) to save the resulting ProjectA assembly (and its pdb and xml files, if you want to be able to debug into it) into a shared folder (e.g. C:\Libraries). Then use a file-reference from ProjectB to C:\Libraries\ProjectA.dll. This keeps your SolutionB build fast, and removes the need to have the ProjectA source code lying around, but means that any changes to ProjectA require a double build (first SolutionA to create the .dll and then SolutionB to pick up the changes to the .dll). (You can also opt to check in C:\Libraries to source control so another team could just provide a pre-built binary for ProjectB rather than you having to have anything to do with SolutionA yourself)

To clarify what I mean by Project-references and File-references: In your Solution explorer, right-click on the project's References folder and choose "Add Reference...". In the dialog box that appears, you can choose the tab "Projects" to list the projects in your Solution, and reference one of them (a project-reference). Or choose the "Browse" tab to browse to find a pre-built assembly .dll file (a file-reference)

(You could also install the assembly from ProjectA into the GAC, and then use the add reference dialog to reference it from the ".NET" tab, but IMHO this is a more complicated approach to use as you have more mess to clean up to remove the dll from your system)

There are a couple of options.

1. If the same team manages both solutions, I would highly recommend just putting them both in the same team project, Or just sharing the same source repository between both projects.
2. If they are managed by different teams, it might make sense to just give solution b a binary copy of solution a, and update it when a does a release.
3. If neither of those work, you could add a custom msbuild script in solution b which will get the latest version of solution a from source and build it, before building b. Something like this

My personal opinion is that team projects tend to get over used. I like to just have one team project per team and put all code in the repository there.

Guys, I found a better solution. When I create SolutionB, then I just add ProjectA in SolutionB without branching. To do that, just click File -> Source Control -> Add Project From Source Control. Voila :-)