I recently upgraded my SharePoint development machine to VSeWSS 1.3 and have noticed a behavior that I didn't think existed before. I have two custom web parts that use several common assemblies, and both will live in the same site. I'm trying to create a third 'common' web part that copies these files to the Bin folder and adds safe control entries to web.config so I can remove one of the web part solutions, if needed, without crippling the other one.
With the prior version of VSeWSS I thought it only included assemblies in the manifest if you included them in the given Visual Studio project. I've removed the common assemblies from the two web part projects, but entries for them still end up in their solution manifests. Obviously the extensions are looking at the references for the web part and going by that, even if the file are in another directory alltogether.
Is there any way to tell the extensions to not add assembly entries to the manifest even if they are referenced in the project? Or is there a better way to separate the common code from the web parts that use it?
Yes you could prevent VSeWSS from deploying assemblies. Just select the assembly in the list of referenced assemblies in you VS project and look at its properties. There you can find the option "LocalCopy", which you have set to false to prevent the assembly from being deployed.