Keeping assembly references sync'ed during development and straight in production

[Mike Jansen]

We're doing .NET development for PocketPC, BizTalk, and miscellaneous other
things. One of the difficulties has been keeping references to assemblies
intact in a project when the referenced assemblies are under development as
well. For example, I am developing AppA that uses ComponentB and
ComponentC, which are both being developed by two other developers (or in
BizTalk, MapA that uses SchemaB and SchemaC, all in different assemblies).
The interfaces are fairly fleshed out so that ComponentB and ComponentC
aren't going to have public interface changes frequently, but I've at least
got the "shell" components that I can reference in AppA and get my coding
going. Problem: Throughout the development process, ComponentB and
ComponentC are getting updated with more internal functionality, bug fixes,
etc. But whenever a new binary gets put into Source Safe, and I get it, I
need to then drop and re-add my references.

I understand that I can add the component projects to my solution and then
reference them as project references. This may solve part of the problem.
The point where I am at is trying to come up with a solid development
process in VS.NET. I'm also trying to take this development process
knowledge (once I have it!) of component versioning and expand it to a
better understanding of production versioning of assemblies (and things like
manifests).

So, after all that introduction, my (2-part) question is just this: Has
anyone worked through this process and been able to come up with a solid and
efficient way of doing team development in Visual Studio .NET (in regard to
cross-project references) and also successfully managed production updates
with components of different versions? There is documentation scattered
about all over, but I can't seem to get a good grasp overall.

Thanks for any help you can provide.

Mike Jansen
Sr. Software Developer
Prime ProData, Inc.
[mjansen][at][primepro-com]