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My only thought about this is that adding a new assembly to the build slows it down -- I know we've been doing this for some trimming tests, and some other older ones but I guess we should reserve it for where we really have to. Is there not some existing assembly that we could copy to this location instead? (Such as another one of the assemblies we build for testing purposes)

Is there not some existing assembly that we could copy to this location instead?

We could use some other .dll, but it would be harder to guarantee that it's not used (so hasn't been loaded yet and we can copy it somewhere and load from file)

Would something like this be too hacky?

            if (!AppDomain.CurrentDomain.GetAssemblies().All(assy => !assy.FullName.Contains("System.Data")))
                throw new Exception();

            string location = Path.GetDirectoryName(Assembly.GetAssembly(typeof(string)).Location);
            string assy = Path.Combine(location, "System.Data.dll");
             // copy it , load it

@danmosemsft It would be a little bit hacky and I am not sure how adding a dependency to any System*.csproj would affect the build time? Could it defeat the purpose of not slowing down the build by adding a new library?

@eiriktsarpalis what is your opinion on this?

@ViktorHofer @safern We need to test a scenario, where given .dll that has not been yet loaded into memory, has a path longer than 260 characters.

We have two options:

• create a new project, ensure the path is > 260 chars and load the dll. It ensures that the .dll has not been loaded yet (because nobody has been using it so far), but adds a new project.
• add a reference to a library that the given test suite has not been using so far, ensure the path is > 260 chars, and load it. It might change the project dependencies and build order but does not add a new project.

What is the recommended option from the CI point of view?

Building and loading an additional assembly is fine from a performance standpoint.

@adamsitnik I would go with option a and introduce a new test helper assembly. How do you want to load the assembly? Dynamically or via a reference from the test assembly? In case dynamically, you can add a ProjectReference to the new test helper project and set ReferenceOutputAssembly=false to false, i.e. https://github.com/microsoft/MSBuildSdks/blob/1a1e144dd2d5116a280b3f87e1d4ff49c30619b4/src/Traversal/Sdk/Sdk.props#L41.