If you put an assembly in the GAC then the runtime will be able to find it *when you ask for it by name* wherever you application is running from on the local machine.

The assembly name is not, say, foo.dll but rather "foo, version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=aabbccddeeff11223344".

There are two ways to ask for an assembly by name: explicitly using Assembly.Load(); implicitly by setting up a reference in the applicaiton's manifest. The latter is done in Visual Studio by adding a reference to the assembly in the "References" in the solution view. It is done from the command line using the /r: compiler switch.

Regards

Richard Blewett - DevelopMentor
http://www.dotnetconsult.co.uk/weblog
http://www.dotnetconsult.co.uk

  Hi folks,

I was under the impression that once you had loaded an assembly into the
GAC, that you didn't have to make specific reference calls to the assembly
in another assembly. I was under the impression that this was the way you
extended the .net framework.

I've just done a little test a put a very basic assembly into my local GAC.
All well and good, but I can still only manually reference i.e. provide a
physical path and filename, the DLL to get to it's contents. So what
exactly does the GAC do if it doesn't serve as a central repository for ones
assemblies. I know it says it's there for when we want to share assemblies,
but how is this done when we still have to make a manual reference?

More to the point, if I am making manual references I'm still subject to the
same old cock up factor. Either I'm barking up the wrong tree or I'm
missing some sort of flag or declaration.