Copying a DLL's dependencies in Visual Studio

You can achieve this with the project properties window. Visual Studio allows you to define events to occur, before, or after building. To get to the project properties window simply right-click on your project in the solution explorer window and click on 'properties'. From the left hand side go to the 'build events' tab.

In the post-build box type in a few copy commands. For example:

copy "$(SolutionDir)mydll.dll" "$(TargetDir)"

Where $(SolutionDir) and $(TargetDir) are both predefined variables. The standard syntax is as follows:

copy "source directory and file name" "destination directory"

If you click on the 'edit post build...' button it will bring up a box which has a listing of these predefined variables that you can insert (like $(SolutionDir) and $(TargetDir))

As a side note, this is a useful process for copying other files, such as custom configuration files, images, or any other dependencies your project may have.

The following fragment works for me:

<Project>
  ...
  <ItemGroup>
    <Content Include="Path\to\dll\dllname.dll">
      <CopyToOutputDirectory>Always</CopyToOutputDirectory>
    </Content>
  </ItemGroup>
  ...
</Project>

This works for C#. For native C++ it still copy dll to output folder, but this dependency is not visible in Visual Studio, it should be edited in project file directly.

To test on non-trivial example I tried to run C# project A which depends on native C++ project B. B projects depends on thirdparty native dll C - this dependency is implemented via fragment above in project file. When I build A, C is copied to binary folder.

I tried it in Visual Studio 2010.

Take a look at this solution provided by Alex Yakunin http://blog.alexyakunin.com/2009/09/making-msbuild-visual-studio-to.html It worked for me really nicely - the scenario being DevExpress libraries expressly used had other dependencies which caused problems when deployed)

• Note 1: Visual studio 2010 seems add referenced dlls automatically, however msbuild didn't. So Alex's solution worked since the release scripts used msbuild.
• Note 2: Also had to make sure that for the referenced libraries (those which were referenced in code) copy-local was actually set to True in the csproj, even though the Solution Explorer said it was. The best way is to set copy-local = False, Save, set copy-local = True, Save.

These two steps - copy-local=true for referenced libraries and adding msbuild targets for the indirect references automated the build setup for me.