Re: Trying to get reference from the GAC

The GAC is a deloyment choice and typically the first place that the runtime
will search for assemblies when the app runs. It is not really intended to
be a place that you reference assemblies in the development environment.
You can put assemblies anywhere in the file system and browse to them if you
want to add a reference. This "references in the GAC" is a common question,
and my guess is that people believe that if an assembly is going to be
deployed to the GAC then they must reference it at development time in the
GAC, but that's not the case. ( Visual Studio's references at development
time are not to the GAC. )
--
Phil Wilson
[MVP Windows Installer]

"David Thielen" <thielen@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:75FABC7C-C77B-4252-929B-6EB0699B4C31@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
I had assumed there was a way to say "look in the GAC" without giving it
the
specific file location. Based on your post below I assume that works for a
running program but not for Visual Studio?

--
thanks - dave
david_at_windward_dot_net
http://www.windwardreports.com

Cubicle Wars - http://www.windwardreports.com/film.htm




"Steven Cheng[MSFT]" wrote:

Hi Dave,

From your description, you want to change the .NET framework system
assemblies' reference path (in Visual Studio IDE at development time)
from
"C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727" to their GAC location,
correct?

Based on my understanding, the system assemblies seems be particularly
processed in the Visual Studio's design-time and will always point to the
framework folder. Also, I don't think it is safe to redirect the
reference
path to the GAC path since GAC path is in a customized folder "%system
dir%\assemblies" which is not intended to be used by user directly(other
than the .net clr runtime itself).

If you do want to share the same location of those framework assemblies,
I
think you can consider the following means(though it is not documented
and
not guranteed to work well):

** For Visual STudio 2005, you can manually add a registry entry to make
a
custom folder become one of the search paths when you launch "Add
Reference" dialog in Visual Studio IDE

#Adding assemblies to the Add References dialog in Visual Studio 2005
http://blogs.msdn.com/astebner/archive/2005/11/28/497693.aspx

** You can move those assemblies you want to share the same physical path
to a custom folder and add that custom folder as one of the search path
(as
above)

** In your project, you can try removing those existing reference to .net
framework assemblies and add new reference against the new place to see
whether it works.

Hope this helps.

Sincerely,

Steven Cheng

Microsoft MSDN Online Support Lead



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