We DON’T, however ILMerge the assemblies for deployment. We probably should, because it’s not very pretty seeing all those .dlls in the directory with the .exe.

I’m not against NDepend at all – I think it’s a great tool for enforcing rules like component A should not reference component B.

I think that it’s sometimes perceived as a bit of a bike-shed, and that that’s why so many people have opinions on the matter.

As always, thanks for your comments.

Having said that I get the idea that we can use namespaces instead, and use NDepend to manage the result, and thats what we’re doing on my current project but as with all solutions it has its disadvantages.

It does sem like some people get very hot under the collar about the topic though, particularly against multiple projects recently, which I find a bit odd because I have worked on a few projects with just a few big projects and certainly didn’t feel it was inherently superior.

The thing is most of the time, you don’t actually “work with multiple solutions”. The solutions are set up to correspond to what you need to have available to you when performing a given task, so that per task you’re only looking at a single solution.

Thanks for the link – will check it out.

Thanks for your comment.

We decomposed our system into sub components each of them is either an unit of deployment (web site or windows application) or unit of reuse like shared infrastructure libraries , we calling this components products and they all have they independent lifecycle management, inside the product boundaries we have a single solution that contains any number of project that developers with responsibility to the product have decided it’s need the end output of the automatic build process of such solution is merged DLL containing everything found inside the big solution. So when some product reuse others products it just need to make a single binary reference.

But I want to say that I do see merits in conventional wisdom, single solution has its physical limits if you passing them development environment is becoming unworkable. And it very difficult to work with several solutions inside the same product boundary.

Thank you for submitting this cool story – Trackback from DotNetShoutout…

BTW, the tool can also help when comparing and merging solution files.