I have tested this anomaly with several source project types to have the same outcome baffle and confound me. The example below is only for experiment purposes.

IfI create a simple class library project and add a reference to an external framework library dll, then, if I create a Web Setup Project to deploy this class library and add the primary output from the class library project, I get all the dependencies of the referenced external dll included as well, which i do not want?

What confuses this issue further is that i have tried this on a friends machine with what I consider to be an identical setup, even to the extent of exporting my visual studio settings and importing them to his IDE, when he builds exactly the same dll (copied from my class librarybuild project), he does NOT get the dependent dlls of the externally referenced framework dll included in his project output. This scenario is what I want to achieve.

i have examined pretty much every aspect of Visual Studio that I know of. Even down to comparing the vside.vspolicydef and dap.vspolicydeffiles on each machine which are identical. All the .vssettings files in the Profiles folder are identical. The Tools\Deployment\VsdProjects\WebSetup.vdproj are identical.

The Visual studio version is 8.0.50727.762 (SP.050727-7600) using Microsoft .Net framework 2.0.50727 SP1

Hi sloppydec,

You said: IfI create a simple class library project and add a reference to an external framework library dll, then, if I create a Web Setup Project to deploy this class library and add the primary output from the class library project, I get all the dependencies of the referenced external dll included as well, which i do not want?

From my experience, this is a general case we would meet. In my setup project, the external dlls would also be added. We can follow the steps below to remove these external dlls:

1. Open the Solution Explorer.

2. In the Detected Dependencies folder of the Setup Project, select all the dlls you want to remove.

3. Right click all the selected dlls and select Exclude.

4. The removed dlls would disappear in File System view.

You also said: What confuses this issue further is that i have tried this on a friends machine with what I consider to be an identical setup, even to the extent of exporting my visual studio settings and importing them to his IDE, when he builds exactly the same dll (copied from my class librarybuild project), he does NOT get the dependent dlls of the externally referenced framework dll included in his project output. This scenario is what I want to achieve.

From my experience, I have never met such a case. Could you please provide more information about your friend’s machine, such as Visual Studio version and .Net framework version?

Let me know if this does not help.
Aland Li

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Hi Aland -

Thanks for your reply. The case I mentioned above was just a test case to prove that the same outcome was produced by a very simple project/solution however, in the real solution I/we are working with is quite complex and has many projects within the solution (aren't they all) and although the 'Exclude' option is what we are currently doing, it's quite a laborious task to cherry pick the unwanted dlls every time. Furthermore, I'm working on a distributed team across several offices and at the moment I'm on the only VS setup that will not include the multiple dependencies so it's down to me alone to push out the msi every time. You can imagine how restrictive this situation is.

As for your question about which VS2005 version and .Net framework, we are all using identical machine builds and I've checked that we are all using the identical versions as stated in my original post.

Dec