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You make good points on all of them. &nbsp;I will look more closely at the concept of &quot;Versioned dlls&quot; and adding the dll to the GAC.
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You make good points on all of them.  I will look more closely at the concept of "Versioned dlls" and adding the dll to the GAC.

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Our team has inherited legacy code that includes a sloppily used dll.<br />
&quot;Sloppily&quot; meaning it has shared code, but there is no pattern for how it is set up.<br />
Example. &nbsp;10 console applications reference the dll. &nbsp;In today's world, if a new version of the dll is rolled out, every calling app should really be recompiled to bring in the new version of the dll. &nbsp;But the changed portion of the code might affect only 2 of the 10 calling apps.<br />
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My goal here is to minimize those recompiles.<br />
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We don't have time for a complete rewrite. &nbsp;So I listed options below. &nbsp;Please let me know i there are other ideas you might have that could help us! &nbsp;Thank you!!!<br />
1.Keep using the same dll, but make it lives in a shared location.(that way, all calling programs are using the same dll)<br />
2.Split the dll into multiple dlls<br />
3.Clean up the dll. &nbsp;Move specific functions of the dll into the calling program where applicable (like if only one program is calling a dll function, move that function into the calling program)<br />
4.re-architect &nbsp;the dll into a WCF Service.
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Our team has inherited legacy code that includes a sloppily used dll.
"Sloppily" meaning it has shared code, but there is no pattern for how it is set up.
Example.  10 console applications reference the dll.  In today's world, if a new version of the dll is rolled out, every calling app should really be recompiled to bring in the new version of the dll.  But the changed portion of the code might affect only 2 of the 10 calling apps.

My goal here is to minimize those recompiles.

We don't have time for a complete rewrite.  So I listed options below.  Please let me know i there are other ideas you might have that could help us!  Thank you!!!
1.Keep using the same dll, but make it lives in a shared location.(that way, all calling programs are using the same dll)
2.Split the dll into multiple dlls
3.Clean up the dll.  Move specific functions of the dll into the calling program where applicable (like if only one program is calling a dll function, move that function into the calling program)
4.re-architect  the dll into a WCF Service.

How to rearchitect a sloppily used dll.

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Visual Basic.NET

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is a tool used to implement and deploy a service-oriented architecture (SOA) to support distributed computing where services have remote consumers. It features a runtime and a set of APIs in the .NET Framework for building connected, service-oriented applications. Services typically have a WSDL interface (Web Services Description Language) that any WCF client can use to consume the service, regardless of which platform the service is hosted on. WCF implements many advanced Web services (WS) standards such as WS-Addressing, WS-ReliableMessaging, WS-Security, RSS Syndication Services, WS-Discovery, routing and better support for REST services.