Duplicate of: Getting assemblies to show in the .NET tab of Add Reference

So, I'm using Visual C# 2008 Express Edition and I've just been on a bit of a detour as I found out that my assumption that the .NET tab of the 'Add Reference' dialog lists the contents of the GAC was incorrect.

This was a bit of a problem for me as the assembly that I wanted to reference from my project was only available in the GAC. (It was Microsoft.XNA.Framework v2.0 obtained from the XNA 2.0 redistributalbe and as far as I could see it installed only into the GAC).

I worked round the problem by setting the reference to Microsoft.XNA.Framework manually in the .csproj file and then getting a copy of the dll out of the cache. I was then able to create a directory for the DLL, add it to Visual Studio's list of assembly directories in the registry and then voila! I could see it in the .NET tab.

This all seems like a bit of a faff to me and I don't think that my initial assumption (that the .NET tab shows the contents of the GAC) was that unreasonable or would be that uncommon. Can someone who knows more than me tell me

• why the contents of the GAC aren't shown? The documentation just says that they are not, but is there a good reason?
• is there actually a way to get the entire contents of the GAC to be listed? A tick box I've missed somewhere?

Any info much appreciated.