Visual Studio - Why should I remove unused references?

When it comes to writing code, I like everything to be neat and follow a certain set of coding guidelines. I like to adhere to the principle that I always code as if the next person who ends up maintaining my code is a violent psychopath who knows where I live. While it's not a pretty thought, it does remind me that code maintenance is important and it's very likely that someone else might need to maintain your code in the near future. If you regularly write code using Visual Studio as your IDE, you may have a number of libraries and modules referenced in your application. As your application starts to grow and change, you may find that you start to build up quite a few referenced libraries. I've always wondered to myself, does is matter if I have any unused references in my application? Is there any point in removing unused ones, because it doesn't really affect the application....right? Well, it turns out I was wrong.

By removing any unused references in your application, you are preventing the CLR from loading the unused referenced modules at runtime. Which means that you will reduce the startup time of your application, because it takes time to load each module and avoids having the compiler load metadata that will never be used. You may find that depending on the size of each library, your startup time is noticeably reduced. This isn't to say that your application will be faster once loaded, but it can be pretty handy to know that your startup time might get reduced.

If you work with a team of developers that all develop on a single application, you might find that over time your references start to get bloated and there are quite a few that aren't really used. Eventually, the monitoring of dependencies between classes and assemblies can become a hard task.

Another benefit of removing any unused references is that you will reduce the risk of conflicts with namespaces. For example, if you have both System.Drawing and System.Web.UI.WebControls referenced, you might find that you get conflicts when trying to reference the Image class. If you have using directives in your class that match these references, the compiler can't tell which of the ones to use. If you regularly use autocomplete when developing, removing unused namespaces will reduce the number of autocompletion values in your text editor as you type. You may even increase your typing speed, as there are less values to sort through.

There are a number of ways to remove unused references in your application. VB.NET developers have long had this option built into Visual Studio, but for us using C#, we have to use extensions. If you use ReSharper, you may have seen the remove unused references feature when you right click on your references in your project.

It will simply do the magic for you and remove any unused modules in your project. However, if you aren't a fan of ReSharper, there are still other options. There is a great extension available for Visual Studio that is free and will do practically the same thing as the ReSharper extension. Entitled the Reference Assistant for Visual Studio, you can download the extension from the Visual Studio Gallery. The extension performs multi-criteria analysis of a project and decides which assemblies are useful for a project and removes unused ones. In order to use the extension, simply right click on your references in the project.

And you will be presented with a dialog of references that you can choose to remove.

It also has a handy feature that will remove any related 'using' directives after removing the unused references. To edit this option, navigate to the Options tab in Visual Studio and then look for the References Assistant section.

This simple trick can keep your project neat and efficient! Get started using it today.