I am looking to be able to use the Visual Studio 2005 IDE to manage ALL
of my configurations.  It is easy to create custom configurations
throught he configuration manager and then to write code that is
sensitive to the active configuation.  That is easy except when it
comes to references.

What if I have some code that is not included under the current
configuration?  In my case, it is excluded through #if statements.  So
the source is gone, but I am forced to carry heavy payloads in the
final output directory due to the fact that I cannot exclude DLL's no
longer applicable in the references section of the project.

Why is there no simple support for this?  For example... why can't the
properties of a referenced assembly simply contain a list of the
configurations to which they apply?  A simple default value of "Applies
to all configurations" would make sense.

So not wanting to write build scripts, the only thing I have at my
disposal is to ask developers to remove the reference before compiling
under a given configuration and then remember to put them back when
they are done.  This is extremely sloppy.

Does anyone know of any other built-in functionality in the IDE?

Thanks in advance.