What is the best way to add project references

[viniciusdmr]

I'm evaluating Advanced Installer Professional for our company, and I'm testing it by creating an installer for one of our new products (.NET using C# and C++). The BIN folder is a combination of the output of multiple projects; sometimes dependencies are the same between them. To make it easy for us, we have the target of all the projects pointing to the same place.

What we want is validate if the Visual Studio Extension will be useful in this scenario. We tried different approaches, but none of them seems to be doing what we expect.

1) add a reference to all the projects folder failed to validate the .msi file against ICE (using Orca), too many references to the same output.
2) even setting a reference only to the main project (presentation), it added a duplicated reference to the same file (a C++ CLI project) (ICE validation)
3) add the main file manually and locate the dependencies (using AI) also didn't work (it failed to find multiple dependencies) (that was not using the Extension)

In the end, the only thing that worked for us was to add the reference to the files manually.

I'm trying to find what would be the recommended way to add project references. Is there any magic that we are missing? Should we stick with add the files manually?

[Daniel]

Hello and welcome to our forums,

Thank you for giving Advanced Installer a trial.

When using our Visual Studio extension you should try to select the primary output and the project dependencies ONLY of your main application project. If this configuration doesn't suits for you, then the only solution will be indeed to edit the setup project in Advanced Installer and manually delete the duplicated imported files.

If you have any further questions let us know.

All the best,
Daniel