I've seen a bunch of feature requests around this general theme; this seems to be the oldest/most focused, although the description is a little unclear.

What I'd really like is a context menu item on the project's References folder for "Remove unused references".

See also:
http://jetbrains.net/jira/browse/RSRP-3898
http://jetbrains.net/jira/browse/RSRP-24775
http://jetbrains.net/jira/browse/RSRP-33587
http://jetbrains.net/jira/browse/RSRP-48171
http://jetbrains.net/jira/browse/RSRP-56678

Yeap, the same context menu should exist for the whole solution as well.

It would be cool to have a visual indication of the redundant reference in the solution explorer tree view. Perhaps the text is in faded grey, or it is underlined with a green squiggly line. As the 'References' node is often collapsed, it'd be nice to have this status carried up to the parent so that it was easy to spot at a glance of the project.

I would like this feature. Please, do it in next release! ;)

Would be incredibly useful for project maintenance. Bump!

I would find this verry usefull.

Three features were implemented:

• Optimize references: to see all external usages regarding specific referenced assembly, to remove all unused referenced assemblies.
  
• Remove unused reference refactoring: to quickly check and remove unused references (without dispalying usages).
  
• Safe delete on assemlby reference: to quick delete assembly reference and be sure that this will not affect your compilation. Otherwise you will see affected usages.

These features were implemented for C#, VB and XAML.

Note: if there were some redunandt namesapace imports which makes you reference unused assemblies, then both the assembly reference and corresponding redundant namespace imports will be removed.

Great news, thanks.

There are some cases where a reference has an 'indirect' dependency on another assembly which is loaded at runtime (possibly by reflection). If this other assembly is not in the bin directory, one will get a runtime error. The result is this 'other' assembly is often referenced just to be copied but it's not actually used by the project's code and so would be marked as a redundant reference.

An example would be Raven.Client.Embedded that loads Raven.Storage.Managed at runtime.

So to support this, I suggest being able to add an ignore file to the project, perhaps in a similar way one can add GlobalSuppressions.cs for Code Analysis.

You could write such an ignore file right away. Add some code which references any public type from the assembly to be kept in references.