Frankly, I’m surprised that I can’t find more blog posts on this topic.

I can’t imagine that I’m the only software engineer who has encountered dependency management of the form “it’s somewhere on the K: drive”. And yet, when I search online, I can’t find anyone griping about this. All I can find is this one blog post by Sonatype that goes on to advertise their Nexus repository manager.

In this case, we use environment variables for all our builds.. or so I thought. Last week, I encountered one project that was making an exception and doing its own thing: It was explicitly calling a tool on the K: drive and linking against libraries on that drive. Not only that, it didn’t use environment variables but hardcoded the path to the network drive in the build script and VS project settings.

I prefer expressing the difference between project a solution owns and projects it does not own (dependencies) with the help of Visual Studio’s solution folders. It’s a trick I didn’t […]