Third Party DLLs with TFS Build Server

Question

I am just creating an automatic assembly for the first time in Team Foundation Server (TFS) / Visual Studio 2010 .

This is a WPF 4 application that uses the Entprise library, as well as some of the components that were built in Expression Blend .

The application creates OK inside Visual Studio. However, it cannot be created using the build server.

For instance:

The imported project "C: \ Program Files (x86) \ MSBuild \ Microsoft \ Expression \ Blend.NETFramework \ v4.0 \ Microsoft.Expression.Blend.WPF.targets" could not be found. Verify that the path in the <Import> declaration is correct and that the file exists on disk.

Do I need to install third-party DLLs on the build server? Or is it enough to check the DLL files in TFS?

Answer 1

I always create a third-party DLL folder as part of my solution (in the root solution called Libs ) and the projects reference them from this folder. Thus, assemblies will work without any additional efforts, locally receive the latest data on a new computer and on the assembly server.

In addition, since third-party DLL files are part of your SCC trunk, you can execute them in branches if necessary.