DLLs: Important stuff, and questions about Angelina Jolie’s use of DLLs

Original title for this blog:  

OMG: I appeared to have made a commitment to show how to build a dll in a previous blog and Angelina Jolie tells her story about DLLs

I am sorry, I made the statement:

• “In this blog, we will create a simple DLL that works in both Windows 7, Vista and the like, as well as on a Microsoft mobile device. “ 
  • What I meant to say was: “In a series of blog entries I will show you how to build a DLL that can be used in Windows 7, Vista and the like, as well as on a Microsoft mobile device…” 
  • My bad. 
  • Apologies.
• Oh the interview with Angelina Jolie didn’t happen, honestly, I didn’t even have the guts to ask.
• But I will tell you about DLLs.
• However, if Angelina used Windows, then she used DLLs, these are the atoms that drive Windows software development.  Hopefully that photo is “fair use” IP.
• WOW, she has skinny arms.

The Important stuff:

Back to DLLs, a way to store your programming stuff.  In one of the previous blogs, I talked about DLLs.  Let’s examine how the DLL is referenced in the Visual Studio environment.  To set a reference, in any of the Visual Studio tools you would use the reference and then right click it to add the DLL assembly reference to you IDE.  To add the reference to a DLL, you would right click on the reference for the project (you can have more than one project in a solution), select “Add Reference”, another dialog box opens.  One of the tabs you would select from the .NET tab, in the case of XNA, you might pick Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Pipeline, which isn’t selected by default when you start with building a new XNA project.  The following are brief explanations of the tabs:

.NET Tab

Lists all .NET Framework components available for referencing.

COM Tab

Lists all COM components available for referencing.  COM is a type of class library that has some added features and legacy features.  COM is only used in Windows and not Windows Mobile or Windows CE. 

Projects Tab

Lists Visual Studio projects in the current solution available for referencing. Select assemblies from this tab to create project-to-project references. This tab is used if you wish to reference another project either that are in the IDE or in the Projects Folder, you have to navigate the folder to find the DLL

Browse Tab

Allows you browse additional files to find a component not listed in the current tab and add it to the list.

Recent Tab

Displays recently added references.

Conclusion

Next blog will discuss how to use these references in your code.