C#: Custom assembly directory

Question

Say we have an application which consists of one executable and 5 libraries. Regularly all of these will be contained in one directory and the libraries will be loaded from there.

Is it possible to do so that I can have for example some of the libraries in one directory called Lib, and the rest in one called Lib2? So that the application directory would only contain the executable itself and the other assemblies would be contained in various logical directories.

How can I do this? And I would like to know how to do the loading of the assemblies, but also how to make the building of the application put the assemblies in the right directory.

Answer 1

You can add additional search paths to your app.config that it looks in to load assemblies. For example

<runtime>
  <assemblyBinding xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1">
    <probing privatePath="lib;thirdParty" />
  </assemblyBinding>
</runtime>

You can see more details here.