We have several DLLs referenced by a project that are not available through NuGet. Every time one has to copy the DLL file across after pulling the solution from TFS/VSTS, which is quite tedious and confusing for ppl not familiar with our projects.
Is there a way to properly check the DLLs in to TFS/VSTS? Obviously we can include the BIN folder in the solution but is that the right thing to do?
In some scenarios it's useful to have a folder named "libs", or "libraries", for example, that contains all the assemblies required by your projects to compile and run. So you can check-in this folder. In each project you need to reference the dll contained here (Visual Studio automatically save the path using relative path).
Include the "bin" folder is not the right way, because if a developer performs a "Clean solution" in Visual Studio, it clean this folder.
Getting DLL's Into Visual Studio Team Services in Two Steps
I'm not sure how to do it in TFS, but with Visual Studio Team Services (Visual Studio Online) do the following...
Step 1
In VSTS navigate to where the files should be located in the Code area of your project.
Step 2:
Simply click the upload files button and select the .dll or other files types you want to add to your repository.
Now when you get or refresh the project your .dll files will be included as well.
It would be nice to be able to do this directly from Visual Studio, unfortunately I'm am not aware of how to do this.