Getting intellisense in markup while using web.config redirectBinding

Question

We are using a set of web parts we've built ourselves to aid in projects we do as consultants. As the web parts progress we build a new version with a different version number of some of the assemblies. There are dependencies between some of these assemblies. To prevent upgrading our entire set of assemblies at once, lately we've adopted bindingRedirects as a way to upgrade some of our assemblies and make bugfixes in them.

For example: We are running version 1.0 AssemblyB is depending on AssemblyA. AssemblyA get's upgraded to version 1.1. In order to get this to work in an ASP.NET website, we add a binding redirect voor AssemblyA specifying that anyone looking for version 1.0 should be redirected to version 1.1. At runtime all is well.

However this construct breaks IntelliSense in ASP.NET markup. How can I fix this?

Answer 1

We've solved this issue. What it comes down to is this. Visual Studio does not take web.config into account whenever assemblies are reflected for IntelliSense. It does resolve anything you put into the GAC. So in order to make IntelliSense work in our case, we have created policy assemblies that redirect from one version to another and installed them in the GAC.

You can find how to do that here: MSDN.