Why does it keep asking me for .dlls?

I'm new to programming and really frustrated with this program. I got my ESRI add-in working, then I go to try and make a change without saving it and see if it improves the function. It didn't and turns out it saved everything when I debugged the solution. What kind of a stupid setup is this? WHY HAVE A SAVE BUTTON WHEN IT WILL SAVE NO MATTER WHAT. I've spent hours trying to get back where I was. Now it keeps asking me for missing .dlls. If I browse and point to the dll it says its not valid. Fine, so I reinstall the program that created the dlls and also make sure I have permission to it. No change. Finally I copy the dll into my resource folder. Now it asks me for another dll. WHY CAN'T I JUST POINT IT TO THE FOLDER WITH ALL THE DLLS AND LET IT FIGURE OUT WHAT IT NEEDS?
It also gives me errors saying so and so needs to be false. WHY CAN'T I JUST RIGHT CLICK ON THE ERROR AND SWITCH WHATEVER IT IS TO FALSE. Why do I have to hunt through a bunch of settings to find the cause of the error? Did they work to make this more difficult than it needs to be?

No, just having them in the folder is not the same as having them in the project. In the solution explorer, open up the References folder and see if you see any of the DLLs listed. If they are listed, make certain they don't have a error icon over the normal icon. If the DLLs are not in the project, right click the References folder and select, Add Reference. From there you can browse for the DLL. Once the DLL is visible in the paths pane, click on each DLL and check the checkbox next to the name (assuming VS2012). Once the DLLs are added to the project, you can select each one and look at it in the properties pane. There you can set the option to copy local if you need to do that. Since you are dealing with ESRI DLLs, many of which were quite old when last I worked with them, you might need to consider the Embed Interop Types option as well but I would look over whatever documentation you can get from ESRI with regards to referencing their DLLs into a .NET project.

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Scott Lysle13y ago
No, just having them in the folder is not the same as having them in the project. In the solution explorer, open up the References folder and see if you see any of the DLLs listed. If they are listed, make certain they don't have a error icon over the normal icon. If the DLLs are not in the project, right click the References folder and select, Add Reference. From there you can browse for the DLL. Once the DLL is visible in the paths pane, click on each DLL and check the checkbox next to the name (assuming VS2012). Once the DLLs are added to the project, you can select each one and look at it in the properties pane. There you can set the option to copy local if you need to do that. Since you are dealing with ESRI DLLs, many of which were quite old when last I worked with them, you might need to consider the Embed Interop Types option as well but I would look over whatever documentation you can get from ESRI with regards to referencing their DLLs into a .NET project.