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What are the advantages and disadvantages of using the GAC?

I would like to hear your opinion regarding the benefits of disadvantages of using the GAC in .Net applications. To me, it looks more professional to sign & register the application dlls in the GAC. It's more secure, helps with backward compatibility, side by side installations and easy to reference for end-users. But I want to hear the other side as well.

peterh
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Adi barda
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  • Also refer to these similar topics: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/896551/is-it-better-to-register-dlls-to-gac-or-reference-them-from-bin-folder-in-asp-ne and http://stackoverflow.com/questions/538710/why-should-i-not-use-the-gac – Dirk Vollmar May 18 '10 at 08:28

2 Answers2

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It's a great idea to use the GAC for your shared assemblies but be sure to understand some of the potential drawbacks. It can also introduce extra complexity to development and deployment.

Take a look at this previous question for potential drawbacks: Why should I NOT use the GAC?

Community
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David Neale
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You'd already listed advantages, the main disadvantage to using the GAC in my view is that it gets slightly more complicated to install, you can't just copy the files in and run, and same when you want to uninstall you can't just delete one directory.

I'm assuming that it's for an assembly that will just be used by your own apps, so you don't have to worry about other peoples apps linking to it.

Hans Olsson
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