Transitive references in Xamarin Studio

Question

I have a Portable Class Library project in Xamarin Studio, with a corresponding test (NUnit Library) project. Some of the public APIs in the PCL project consume or return classes from NuGet packages, e.g. System.Collections.Immutable.

How can I make those available to the test project without explicitly re-adding them all as references? It seems as though there should be some way to tell the PCL project to export all its dependencies, or the test project to resolve transitive dependencies, but I can't see how to do it.

Answer 1

Sounds like you are used to Java's chained (transitive) dependencies. ;-)

There is no automated method for "re-exposing" internal assembly dependancies of one .Net assembly to the consuming assembly.

If you need to reference something within one of those internal ref'd assemblies you will have to explicitly reference that assembly, in your NUnit-based Test project and add a corresponding using declaration in the source. Thus creating a runtime dependency on that assembly's version, which is injected into the assembly at compile time.