'Visual Studio: How to tell exe where to look for dll's?

I have a .lib included in my project (Linker->Input->Additional Dependencies) that makes my .exe build require a corresponding .dll to be provided with the .exe. Naturally, I would put the .dll in the same folder as .exe and that works fine, but I want to have only the .exe in the main folder and all other files, along with this .dll, in a subdirectory. How do I make the .exe look for it in that directory?

Just for clarification, I don't need VS to look for the .dll, but the program(.exe), after it has been built. Sorry if this was already asked, but I just can't find the right answer.

visual-studio-2010dlldirectoryexe


Solution 1:[1]

Temporary solution: Apparently this is much harder than I thought, just like Hans said. However, I have stumbled upon a neat trick which can somewhat make it look like this, and that is to create an internal .exe and put it into a subfolder with the .dll's, while it is just executed from a main .exe. ShellExecute command can be used to do this. Anyway, if anyone know how to actually do the real thing, please write it down :)

Solution 2:[2]

As @Hans Passant commented, I've solved it in my project (C#/WPF/vs2019) by editing app.config to:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<configuration>
  ...
  <runtime>
    <assemblyBinding xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1">
      <probing privatePath="External"/>
    </assemblyBinding>
  </runtime>
</configuration>

Note that my output dir tree is like:

bin/
|--<myapp>.exe
|--External
    |--nuget1.dll
    |--nuget2.dll

You can specify multiple paths by delimiting them with semicolon.

For more information, see MS Docs.

Sources

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Source: Stack Overflow

Solution Source
Solution 1 Vladivarius
Solution 2 Hurry Zeng

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