Work arround for copied SNK file

In follow-up to my post on Visual studio 2005 copying my snk file all over the place in my solution I got the following response from the Microsoft Team:

Hi Marcel, we are already aware of this issue and hope to address it in a future version of VS

This behaviour was already filed as a bug in May this year but it will not be fixed in the Whidbey release. In stead the following information helped allot on why they created this behaviour and the workarround:

The default behaviour in the project system is to add the .snk file to the project for reasons of source code control. It’s a lot easier to manage your SCC state, etc. if everything in the project is under a “project cone” (meaning under one top-level project directory — usually the directory which contains the .csproj/.vbproj/.vjsproj file).

However, the good news is that the project system provides a way for you to override this behaviour. Follow these steps:

[1] Right click on the root folder of the project and select “Add Existing Item”
[2] Browse to the .snk file in the Open File dialog
[3] Click on the down-arrow on the button that says “Add” and choose “Add Link”

What you’ll see is a node for the .snk file in the root folder of the project, but the file won’t be physically copied to the project folder. At this point, you can go to the Signing page, and choose the .snk file you just linked. This works correctly in the most recent builds of VS, and it should work correctly in Beta 2 as well.

I think this is a workable solution, so I will use that for now.

Thanks to Robert and Dennis for their comments. Robert: I think that editing the project files by hand is not a real solution, But your seccond sugestion was spot on 🙂 Thanks!.

The solution proposed by Dennis also makes sense but I always try to get a solution to be fully self-contained. Meaning that I don’t need to setup any environment stuff to get things running (besides the default VS.NEt installed stuff) this makes my project more portable and saves the developers on the team a lot when opening a new solution or project. I think by using the link option to a common shared location for the key file is what I am looking for. If this appears not to work sufficient I will try the other option.