I have a C# (I am using VS2012) project that, when I checked it out of TFS, seemed to already reference an assembly in the GAC, but the DLL version I found in the GAC is incorrect and older than what the application expects, so I cannot build. Another developer here told me that all the applications are "self-contained," which would imply that they do NOT reference assemblies in the GAC.
My question is, if a project has a reference to a DLL that is not in the project's bin folder (or elsewhere in the project folder structure), does Visual Studio look for and automatically "fix up" the reference for the same DLL if it finds it in the GAC? I did not think it did that, and have always had a lot of assembly reference headaches when anything changes, so I am a little confused as to how this project came out of TFS already pointing to an assembly in the GAC (albeit the wrong version.) Since the code expects classes, properties, and methods that do not exist in the older version of the assembly in the GAC, I cannot build.
Thanks in advance for any tips on this kind of problem.