I'm maintaining the build process for our application which consist of an ASP.Net application, two different Win32 services and other sysadmin related applications.

I want to end up with the following configuration to be used both when debugging & deploying.

libraires/    -- Contains shared assemblies used by all other apps.
web/          -- ASP.Net site
service1/     -- Win32 service 1 (seen under the service control manager)
service2/     -- Win32 service 2 
adminstuff/   -- Sysadmin / support stuff used for troubleshooting

The problem is assembly probing privatePath in the app.config does not support relative directories outside the application root. Ie: can't use ../libraries. Very frustating...

If I strong name our assemblies, I could use codeBase config element which seems to support absolute path but you need to specify each assembly individually.

I also tried hooking into AppDomain.AssemblyResolve event, but I'm getting FileNotFoundException from the .Net Fusion before I can even register the event handler in Main().

I don't like the idea of registering the assemblies in the GAC. Too much hassle when deploying / upgrading application.

Is there another to do this without having the specify the path of each requiered assembly ?