How to properly check in DLLs/assemblies to TFS/Visual Studio Team Services (was VSO)

In some scenarios it's useful to have a folder named "libs", or "libraries", for example, that contains all the assemblies required by your projects to compile and run. So you can check-in this folder. In each project you need to reference the dll contained here (Visual Studio automatically save the path using relative path). Include the "bin" folder is not the right way, because if a developer performs a "Clean solution" in Visual Studio, it clean this folder.

Getting DLL's Into Visual Studio Team Services in Two Steps

I'm not sure how to do it in TFS, but with Visual Studio Team Services (Visual Studio Online) do the following...

Step 1

In VSTS navigate to where the files should be located in the Code area of your project.

Step 2:

Simply click the upload files button and select the .dll or other files types you want to add to your repository.

Now when you get or refresh the project your .dll files will be included as well.

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It would be nice to be able to do this directly from Visual Studio, unfortunately I'm am not aware of how to do this.

The simple way is that:

1. Put assembly files in the folder under the team project or your solution folder level.

2. Map the necessary assemblies to the local machine according to your solution/project, for example D:\Lib[assembly files], D:[solution folder][Project folder]

3. Reference these assembly by right click the reference folder of project and browser to these assemblies files and add
4. Check the file path in project file (e.g. csproj), the code likes ....\Lib\XXX.cs
5. For build, in Source Settings (XAML, Build Agent Folder)/Repository Mappint (VNext, LocalPath), keep the similar structure