Updated June 5, 2006
Iron Speed Designer V3.2 and V4.0
You can easily use third-party (or external) DLL's in applications and compile them using either Visual Studio .NET or the built-in .NET Framework VBC and CSC compilers. Nearly any .NET-compliant DLL can be added to your project, including COM objects.
Step 1: Place your DLL in the Bin folder of your application.
Step 2: If you are using the VBC or CSC compiler, modify the CompileApplication.rsp file in your application folder to add a reference to the DLL. When Iron Speed Designer uses vbc.exe or csc.exe to compile the application, it uses
...\<Application Folder>\CompileApplication.rsp
to get its compilation settings. Using a text editor such as Notepad, add the name of the DLL at the end of line starting with /reference separated with a comma, e.g.:
/reference:BaseClasses.dll,System.dll,System.Data.dll,System.Drawing.dll,System.Web.dll,System.Xml.dll,Interop.DTS.dll,Interop.DTSCustTasks.dll,Interop.DTSPump.dll
In this example, the third-party DLL's are: DTS, DTSCustTasks, and DTSPump.
If you are using the .NET Framework 2.0 / 3.0, you can omit Steps 2 and 3. Simply place the DLL files in your application’s Bin directory.
Step 3: Fully qualify the namespace for the classes from the third-party DLL's you wish to use in CompileApplication.rsp.
Import the namespaces in the /imports: section. This will import the namespaces for the whole application.
Import the namespaces in individual classes (i.e. Visual Basic .NET classes in your applications) that make use of the namespaces.
Fully-qualify the classes from the third-party DLL's when you make use of classes from these third-party DLL’s.
Step 4: Build and run the application.