At work we are going from being a Delphi-centric shop, to a Delphi and .NET shop. To say that has been a bit of a learning curve going from Delphi to C#. Just learning the IDE is a substantial task. One problem we had was with shared code assemblies having different paths on each programmer’s machine. In the .csproj file, the assembly’s hintpath was set to an absolute and that wasn’t going to work.

I tried creating an environment variable and editing the hintpath to use that, a nice feature of Delphi 7. But, that didn’t work and I couldn’t find any obvious way of handling this in the IDE.

Google to the rescue! After a quick search, I found a blog posting VS.NET and hintpath problems… on Serge van den Oever’s blog. This little trick did the job.

A fix to this is setting a registry entry to the folders with shared assemblies, if the assembly can’t be found, this path is checked. Add a key with any name to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\7.1\AssemblyFolders, and set its (Default) value of type REG_SZ to the path with your assemblies.