NuGet is great for supplying managed dlls, but refuses to allow you to add references to unmanaged. Yet it would still be the perfect format for shipping them.

There are already some NuGet packages out there that do clever things, one of my favourites is OctoPack from OctopusDeploy. Instead of just adding some dlls, this NuGet package modifies your .csproj so that if you are doing a release build then it will call extra commands to package up your build artefacts into a deployable package. Now this gives me an idea.

First, the test

First of all we’ll start with a very simple program, which will tell is if our wonderful external dll has been made available at run time or not.

class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            const string FakeFile = "fake.externalDll";

            var exists = File.Exists(FakeFile);
            var output = string.Format("{0} {1} found in {2}", FakeFile, exists ? "is" : "isn't", Environment.CurrentDirectory);
            Console.WriteLine(output);
            Console.ReadKey();
        }
    }

Basically if we F5 the solution, we will now get told if we have successfully hacked something together.

Iteration 1

Now to start with, I’m not going to have a finished product. So I’m going to start by manually changing my .csproj. Later iterations will script this.

If you’ve ever unloaded and edited a .csproj then you’ve probably already seen the commented out section at the bottom,

<!-- To modify your build process, add your task inside one of the targets below and uncomment it. 
       Other similar extension points exist, see Microsoft.Common.targets.
  <Target Name="BeforeBuild">
  </Target>
  <Target Name="AfterBuild">
  </Target>-->

After a little judicious digging into MSBuild we find that this is a placeholder for some <Task> definitions so we can add the equivalen tof a post build step

<Target Name="AfterBuild">
    <ItemGroup>
      <MyPackageSourceFiles Include="$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)\..\Packages\FakePackage\*.*"/>
    </ItemGroup>    
    <Copy SourceFiles="@(MyPackageSourceFiles)"
          DestinationFolder="$(OutputPath)" >
    </Copy>
  </Target>

And the resulting output

fake.externalDll is found in c:\users\al\documents\visual studio 2012\Projects\DllReferencingDemo\DllReferencingDemo\bin\Debug