Clarification required re use of .NET Assemblies in GAC - Use to use Globally?

Posted by Cognize on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Cognize
Published on 2010-06-03T16:11:08Z Indexed on 2010/06/03 16:14 UTC
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.NET

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assemblies

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gac

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msil

Hi,

I've done much reading and experimentation today regarding sigining of assemblies, and their installation into the GAC via various methods (mscorcfg.msc / drag and drop).

What I thought, was that once a file was in the GAC, you did not need to make references from projects in Visual studio. I know that you CAN make references via the usual Add Reference, Browse etc, but I thought it was automatic. Testing proves this not to be the case.

I came across a forum post looking to achieve the same outcome that suggested adding to the machine.config file under system.web as below.

This did not work, it in fact broke visual studio until I removed it.

   <assemblies>
                <add assembly="Blah.Framework.Logging, Version=1.0.3806.25580, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=0beed4b631ebc3cd" />
            </assemblies>

What I want to know, is am I right in my assumed use of assemblies in the GAC, and is there a way of making them globally available?

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