Looking for Alternative(s) to "Remove Unused References" for .Net Framework projects

Question

Dev Environment: .Net Framework 4.7.2 using Visual Studio 2022 on Win 10 Pro 212H x64

Working on a C# winforms project. I'm nearing the end of the development phase and need to clean -up the References. Unfortunately the VS function "Remove Unused References" is only available to "SDK .csproj projects" (54801).

Is there another way to identify unused References?

Thank you in advance.
Art

Answer 1

I recommend you to perform a search in Visual Studio Marketplace and evaluate them. In a quick search I found one, that is avaialble for free.

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=spongman.RemoveUnusedReferences

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/search?term=remove%20referrences&target=VS&category=All%20categories&vsVersion=&sortBy=Relevance

Hope this helps

Answer 2

Basically the default "Remove Unused References" currently only works with newer SDK style projects. There are requests by community to the product team to add this to other project types also, however as we speak it is not available there.

So your option is to use any third party extension that does this. One of such extension is ReSharper from JetBrains. Please refer the below urls for more information.

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=JetBrains.ReSharper

https://www.jetbrains.com/help/resharper/Refactorings__Remove_Unused_References.html

Hope this helps.