.NET Reference "Copy Local" True / False Being Set Based on Contents of GAC
- by D-Sect
We had a very interesting problem with a Win Forms project. It's been resolved. We know what happened, but we want to understand why it happened. This may help other people out in the future who have a similar problem.
The WinForms project failed on 2 of our client's PCs. The error was an obscure kernel.dll error. The project ran fine on 3 other PCs.
We found that a .DLL (log4net.dll - a very popular open-source logging library) was missing from our release folder. It was previously in our release folder. Why was it missing in this latest release?
It was missing because I must have installed a program on my Dev box that used log4net.dll and it was added to the Global Assembly Cache.
When I checked the solution's references for log4net.dll, they were changed to "copy local=FALSE". They must have changed automatically because log4net.dll was present in my GAC.
Here's where my question starts:
Why did my reference for log4net.dll get changed from COPY LOCAL = TRUE to COPY LOCAL = FALSE? I suspect it's because it was added to my GAC by another program.
How can we prevent this from happening again? As it stands now, if I install a piece of software that uses a common library and it adds it to my GAC, then my SLNs that reference that DLL will change from Copy Local TRUE to FALSE.
