Preventing removal of a shared dll during a wsp solution uninstallation/retraction

Question

I'm working on a bunch of solutions which uses a third party DLL from vendors like Telerik. We use the dll in most of your solutions. But when i uninstall any of the solutions the dll is getting removed from the assembly. This is a very unfortunate behavior.

I guess even putting the dll in the bin folder wont help it. Because i can use multiple solutions in a same web application. In that case if i remove on solution it is removing the dll from bin folder too.

What is the workaround for this ugly issue?

Answer 1

This is indeed painful. You could consider merging 3rd party DLLs in using ilmerge. Additional approaches can be found in Muhimbi's free SharePoint Coding Guidelines (Chapters 8 and 9)

Answer 2

One option is not to include the third party DLLs in your individual solutions. Anything that gets installed with a solution will be removed when you uninstall that solution. You can have a 'framework' solution that installs common DLLs. This way, those common DLLs are only removed if you remove your framework solution. Or you could have a single solution installer for each shared DLL if you want more fine-grained control over them.

See also the question on SharePoint.SE: Multiple solutions using shared dlls can cause havoc when individual solutions are retracted