title: How to handle 30k files in a project which requires them?
body: <p>Visual Studio 2010 RC -> Silverlight Application</p>
  
  <p>We have a library of images that we need to have access to.  They are given to us from a vendor (through an installer) and they are not in a database, they are files in a folder (a very large monster of a folder).  We do not control when the images change, so the vendor needs to be able to override them individually.  We get updates frequently enough from this vendor to state that these images change "randomly" and without our (programmer) knowledge.</p>
  
  <p><strong>The problem:</strong> I don't want 30K images in SVN.  Heck, I don't even want to imagine them in my Solution.  However, our application requires them in order to run properly. So, our build/staging servers need access to these images (we have two build servers).</p>
  
  <p><strong>The Question:</strong> How would you handle it when your application will not work as specified without access to each of 30k images and you don't control when those images change?</p>
  
  <p>I'm do not want to have a crazy large SVN repository.  Because I don't know when any of these images change, I really don't want them in my solution (definitely do not want a large solution, either).  I also don't want a bunch of manual steps to do every time these images change.</p>
  
  <p>Our mantra, up to this point, has always been, any developer could download from SVN, compile and run our app.  These images are going to kill that mantra.</p>
  
  <p>I'm tempted to make a WCF service that will return images if they exist and a dummy image if they don't.  This way all dev boxes will return a dummy image and our build/staging/production boxes will return real images (ones that actually have the vendor's image installer installed on).  </p>
  
  <p>This has to be a solved problem.  </p>
  
  <p>What have other people done to handle these types of problems? </p>
  
  <p>I'm open to suggestions.</p>