Visual Studio Basics - DLL's

Just starting to go to work on Visual Studio. Was receiving an error when I was running a program that said, "This application has failed to start because libfrsdk-8.1.0d.dll was not found. Re-installing the application may fix this problem."

First for dll's, they seem to be the .NET equivalent of JAR files. Dynamic Linked Libraries. What this error seems to be saying is that it can't find the library needed to execute the code. Sort of like a ClassNotFoundException in Java (may be a bit of a stretch).

One option was to add the folder housing the libfrsdk-8.1.0d.dll to my PATH variable but that seems kind of ehhh. Why should I alter an environment variable when most of the shit I do isn't going to need this .dll file?

Another option and the one I went with was to add the .dll to the same folder that houses my actual application. Pasting in the appropriate dll did the trick when I ran the program.

So the last question you may have if you're totally ignorant on Visual Studio and whatnot is "how do I know what folder has my application?" Visual Studio when you build/compile creates a Debug folder underneath your project. This Debug folder contains all sorts of interesting files, most importantly an Application type file with the name of your program. Pasting the dll's in this Debug folder did the trick for me.

More to come I'm sure as I attempt to become savvy in .NET