Getting C# to recognize a dll outside of Visual Studio.

Robert Lawson

14y1.8kC#

Several years before I started working at this job another developer who is no longer here wrote an application in classic ASP using HTML, vbscript and javascript. This is fine but the problem is that 2 pages were written in C# with an HTML file and a code behind file. There was no solution files for these two pages. They may have been originally created in Visual Studio but they don't exist in it now.

That is important because there is a lot of things that Visual Studio just does for you without even thinking.

My problem is that in these two C# pages I need to get them to reference a DLL. This is a simple task when using Visual Studio. You just add a reference to the project and life is good. But outside of VS nothing seems to work.

I tried putting the dll in the same folder as the pages and then I tried the following:
Using myDLL;
myDLL dll = new myDLL();
myDLL dll = myDLL();

I found some code online that said to create an internal static class and use [DLLImport()] but that didn't work either.

Outside of having to rewrite these pages in vbscript (which I don't have the time to do) I am at a loss.

Has anyone ran into this problem before? Is there something that I can put in the web.Config? Or is this just impossible and I am hosed.

BTW this is all running under the 2.0 .net framework.

Thanks,
Robert

2 Replies

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Robert Lawson14y ago
It turns out that the solution to this problem was in IIS. All I needed to do was to expand out the folders under Web Site (we're using IIS 6), right click on the folder my app is located in and make it an application folder.

After I did that the Using statement finally picked up the dll and loaded it.

There was one other thing that I did different, I created a new VS project and added all of my files, the .ASPX, .CS, .ASP, .JS and everything else. I published this all to the web server, selecting the copy All Project Files option. That may have made some difference but I don't know what it would have been because nothing worked until I made the change in IIS.
Mahesh Chand14y ago
Well, first of all, C# pages (.cs files) don't do anything in a web application. A web application just need your UI pages (ASP, ASP.NET, JavaScript, HTML) and the DLL that is generated for the code written in C#. So when you run an application on IIS, IIS don't need .cs files. So even you have .cs files, you will have to compile and build then in a DLL.

I would recommend you create a new empty project, add those files, add new code (DLL reference or anything else), compile DLL and put new DLL on IIS.

It won't be easy. Not sure how C# code is being referenced from the UI pages.