I am working on designing a web application A and was having some difficulty with the design. Any help is greatly appreciated. Below is my scenario:

Web Application A exists today. And it uses data from Database A.
One page in this web application A should display a conrtol that has data from another application(B) and also a link on the page will lead the user to an external website B.
I am working to develop this new webapplication B which will display data from a Database B.

For the webapplication B, I have an object to encapsulate the Datamodel required for B. Say it is B.DataObjects. I am also building a user control to display the data obtained from B.DataObjects.

Now this user control needs to be embeded in my webapplication A. How can i design this such that if I make changes to B.DataObjects doesnot force Application A to be recompiled and redeployed? From what I understand since I am embedding user control B in my application A, the B.DataObjects.dll will be referenced by app A and hence any changes to my B.DataObjects causes a recompile of A. How can I avoid this recompile?

Typical project references would require a recompile. In order to remove this dependency you could load the assembly at runtime. This should decouple the reference, but it adds a bit of complication to development. I haven't used this approach myself, so I can't provide much in the way of details or code samples. Try this search result:

    http://www.google.com/search?q=load+assembly+runtime

As I mentioned, I haven't used this technique, mainly because rebuild projects is not that complicated. What concerns do you have about rebuilding dependent projects that is leading you to desire this less coupled approach?

-Peter

Thanks Peter for the response.
The reason why i dont want to enforce a recompile of dependent projects is as follows:

Currently Web Application A doesnt have frequent releases. By introducing the user control of B in thise application, since i know that app B's dataobjects will be having more releases, i dont want to force a release of app A for every release of app B.

Does that make sense? In my understanding, for changes to any .dll that is in ur projects bin directory, ur project would need to be recompiled irrespective of the number of hops to the actual reference(ex, app X references app y which references app Z. So now APP X has appX.dll,appy.dll and appz.dll in it bin directory. CHange to app Z would cause app X to also be recomipled). Is that correct?

Yes, typically. Any recompile of a dependent assembly will result in a cascading recompile of assemblies up the dependency chain.

by the nature of your update, I could argue that a change to any referenced assembly constitutes a change to the dependent ones and thus the application as a whole. How do you know that the change won't break your dependent assemblies unless you check it out by recompiling all assemblies that depend on the changed one?

-Peter