Like a little Assembly with your GAC?

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Q: Is it posssible to get an assembly out of the GAC to another folder? Let's say you GAC-ed an assembly but you deleted the source by accident?

A: The assembly would be stored in this folder <windowsdir>\assembly\GAC\<Assembly Name>\Version_PublicKeyToken. You can get that using the copy command from the command prompt and using "CD dirname". From Windows Explorer, you cannot do it as Explorer has a custom view of the windows\assembly folder that hides the actual files and subfolders. That's for 1.1 Assemblies. 2.0 Assemblies would be in <windowsdir>\assembly\GAC_MSIL\<Assembly Name>\Version_PublicKeyToken.

Q: GAC_32, GAC_MSIL, GAC_64 - What gives?

Specifically why is there is a GAC_32 and a GAC_MSIL folder? Is it because some assemblies are compiled to x86 machine code (GAC_32) and some assemblies are compiled to MSIL? What dictates where your assembly ends up?

A: The GAC_MSIL cache contains assemblies that can be run in either 32-bit or 64-bit mode, and are JIT compiled to the required word size as needed.

The 32/64 directories contain assemblies that are specific to either 32-bit or 64-bit mode, either because they contain native code or because they make specific assumptions about the word size.

A 32-bit system will only have the GAC_32 directory. A 64-bit system will have both because 32-bit code is supported via emulation (WOW32).

This distinction is new to .NET 2.0, so all the above applies to .NET 2 assemblies. There may be another directory called just "GAC" that contains .NET 1.x assemblies.

Q: What's "GAC"?
A: We'll let Wikipedia have that one.

Peter has been active on the C# and other MS newsgroups, has had samples at gotdotnet.com (now codegallery.com) that have been downloaded over 56,000 times, and has written numerous articles for eggheadcafe.com, for which he is a co-founder, and MSDNAA sites. He has also been a technical reviewer on books from Prentice Hall, Manning and other publishers. Peter was a Microsoft MVP for 10 years. Peter was born and raised in New York City, and after a stint as a jazz musician playing contrabass with the Robert Hunt Trio, migrated to sunny Florida, where he was hired as a rookie Financial Consultant at Merrill Lynch in Orlando, specializing in Corporate Services. It was at Merrill that Peter realized computers and technology were his forte. He spent his last few years at Merrill developing real – time computerized trading and and stock charting program using advanced technical analysis indicators, some of which are his own inventions. In 1997, he moved on to architect and serve as lead developer on a number of innovative web-based and middleware solutions for the healthcare and financial services industry.

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