Azure Website Deployment from Visual Studio - How to deploy just a single missing assembly?

I have an Azure website built using Visual Studio and .NET (C#). I noticed that for whatever reason, an assembly was not getting put into the /Bin folder when BS built the app. So I copied the file to my Bin folder. However, when I deploy, the file I manually copied to the /Bin folder isn't getting included in the deployment. Or at least I don't think it is.

Is there a way I can tell VS to include this file when I publish? Or is there a way I can tell VS to republish the entire app, instead of just files it detects are changed?

Solution

For managed assemblies, setting CopyLocal to true for the reference fixes it.

If it's an unmanaged binary, then you can follow following approach:

Look for AfterBuild on the .csproj file, and include a command to copy the binary to bin directory.

<Message Text="Copy $(SolutionDir)Lib\binary.dll to $(OutDir)binary.dll" Importance="high"/>
<Copy SourceFiles="$(SolutionDir)Lib\binary.dll" DestinationFiles="$(OutDir)binary.dll" />

Include the binary on the .csproj along with other files. Setting visible to false will hide the file on Solution Explorer.
```
<Content Include="Bin\binary.dll">
  <Visible>false</Visible>
</Content>
```