Vs.Net & Referencing Executables

time to read 1 min | 126 words

It's well known (and very frustrating) that VS.Net blocks you from referencing executables in its projects. This is cause for much grief, mainly because developers who wish to use executables as providers of functinality (ILMerge.exe comes to mind) cannot directly reference the executables and those lose many of the benefits of using the abilities of the IDE (not to mention ReSharper).

One solution to those cases is to simply rename the exectuable. Just give it a ".dll" extention and reference it normally. VS.Net will allows you to add it, and you get all the benefits of using the IDE. Then just make sure that in your build scripts (you do have a build script, don't you?) reference the real executable.