File created by Visual Studio, a software development application; saved in a plain text format and contains a reference to a project dependency, such as a .DLL file or other library, that is required by the project; allows the dependency to be "refreshed" automatically by Visual Studio without the user having to manually update it.

REFRESH files are useful for project builds, since the latest dependencies can be automatically retrieved and incorporated into each newly built version of the software. NOTE: Visual Studio commonly creates REFRESH files when external dependencies, such as third-party DLLs, are added to ASP.NET projects.