Why are framework dlls repeated in several places?

Posted by Xose Lluis on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Xose Lluis
Published on 2010-05-17T17:48:34Z Indexed on 2010/05/17 19:50 UTC
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.NET

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assemblies

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gac

After installing .Net 4 and getting some questions that were already answered here I also realized how the Framework dlls are repeated in several places for the different Framework versions (this is not new, it happens with previous versions, but hadn't paid attention to it until now)

1 - GAC: %systemroot%\assembly

2- Framework installation directory: %systemroot%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v...

3- and if you have the Windows SDK installed, also in: C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\

I think the last ones are the so called "Reference Assemblies" and have extra metadata to aid Visual Studio, but

what about location number 2? Why are assemblies repeated there?

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