Beginning Web Development, Silverlight, and ASP.NET AJAX

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CHAPTER 2 ■ BASICS OF WEB DEVELOPMENT WITH ASP.NET
Figure 2-12. Adding a reference
One option is to add a .NET assembly from the .NET tab in the Add Reference dialog
box, in which case the process is straightforward. Just make sure that you deploy the DLL
containing the assembly with your site, and your application should work well. Another
option is to add a COM component from the COM tab, which is a little more complex. As
I mentioned previously, you’ll have to make sure that the COM component is properly
installed on the server as well as the COM interop assemblies that are generated by the
IDE to enable your code to interact with the COM component from the .NET runtime
environment.
If the component that you need isn’t on the list, whether it’s a .NET assembly or a
COM component, you can look for it on the Browse tab, or the Recent tab, where, for your
convenience, recently added components are listed.
So, for example, if you want to use the Microsoft AJAX Extensions for ASP.NET (formerly
known as “Atlas” in its beta form), discussed in Chapters 11 through 14, you can
use the Browse tab to go to their installation directory and pick them up from there (see
Figure 2-13). (Note that you can select multiple files on this tab.) Once you locate the files
using the Browse tab, you will be able to use the controls and functions from these DLLs
in your web site.