Hey all, first of all please let me know if there's a better sub for this. I am very unfamiliar will all the .NET concepts, I don't have time to learn a lot about them, and I haven't been able to find an answer online so far--so here I am. I'm pretty sure at least part of this question falls under the .NET umbrella but honestly, I may be totally off-base.

I have two DLL's provided by a third party company that I need access to in my own C# project, DNVideoXLib and AxDNVideoXLib (they're for controlling microscopes). I also have a sample C# project that makes use of the activeX one to display the video feed on a form. The other DLL exposes a single class that throws a catastrophic COM exception when you try to reference any members, so I'm assuming it's just a dependency for the activeX one.

Right now I'm just trying to duplicate the sample code in a new project, but I get an assembly not found exception when trying to reference anything from them (even though visual studio can see their contents). In the reference properties pages in the sample project they are both listed as File type: ActiveX and Name: (Ax)Interop.(Ax)DNVideoXLib. Additionally, those interop prefixed files do seem to be generated automatically when building the project. I cannot figure out how to reference them the same way in my own project. I tried copying their entries in the sample's .csproj into my own, but they still just show up as normal assembly references.

Sorry if any of that wasn't coherent. Again I have only a vague idea what half of these things are and I honestly just need this shit to work.