Savij

Have you had the problem of making changes to a dll in Visual Studio, doing your build, referencing that changed dll in another Visual Studio instance and viola! the new changes are nowhere to be found. Visual Studio intellisense has no idea about the new changes, and it wont build either???

How can this be? I just overwrote the dll with my new one and somehow it’s not there??? Well friends (and I do use that term loosly) I have your solution. It seems that Visual Studio has a built in Shadow Copy feature. It was put in there for just this situation, to screw things up with references when we are being most productive, but I digress….

Here is how to solve the problem ( This also solves the license problems of some 3rd party controls, read about that here):

I went into the temporary files (mine are at C:\Documents and Settings\jeff\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\ProjectAssemblies) and I deleted all of the folders in there. You may have to unhide these folders in your explorer tools -> folder options -> view tab and you may have to close down visual studio to free up the locks on these files.

Hope this helps!

-Jeff

First off Happy New Year 2008 to everyone. There I am not anti-social, but try to find this in an article thats about clearing up nag screens.

I was recently having a problem with a nag screen from a ComponentOne product. I was unable to get the license to kick in even though I had done everything correctly. For a while I just ignored it, hoping instead that I was wrong about gnomes and that one would show up and fix the problem. Well I apparently was correct about the gnomes existance, or maybe it’s just that they hate me. After a few frustrating hours, or maybe it was minutes I forget. I solved the issue and thought I would share.

I went into the temporary files (mine are at C:\Documents and Settings\jeff\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\ProjectAssemblies) and I deleted all of the folders in there. You may have to unhide these folders in your explorer tools -> folder options -> view tab and you may have to close down visual studio to free up the locks on these files.

Since VS caches it’s assemblies in these shadow copy folders it was not seeing the rebuild done in the IDE. Removing these folders solved the problem.

I also noticed that doing the above solved the occasional problem I was having when I would build a new version of a dll with a new method in it (or changed the signature of an existing one) and when I went back into the IDE it would not pick up the new stuff. I knew I overwrote the old dll and I did a clean and a rebuild but still nothing. Doing the above works every time. Just thought I would pass the news along.

 Good Luck and keep you eyes peeled for those gnomes, they owe me a free solution to a problem <grin>.

-Jeff