posted on Tuesday, November 29, 2005 5:53 AM
by
anoras
Visual Studio 2005: Erronous MSDN documentation, Add Reference and the GAC
When I read this document
on MSDN I got a little scared. The document claims that assemblies
installed in the GAC will automatically be listed in the Add References
dialog in Visual Studio 2005. Fortunately the documentation is wrong
about this; assemblies in the GAC aren’t listed in Visual Studio. Why
is this fortunate? To list an assembly in the Visual Studio IDE you’ll
have to know what you’re doing. Developers like to learn things using a
trial and error approach, and installing an assembly in the GAC might
be something a developer would try since the assemblies listed in the
Add Reference dialog are “shared”. I made this assumption way back in
the Visual Studio .NET days. At the time I was ignorant about CAS,
simply because I hadn’t had the time to learn about it, and didn’t know
if there was a difference between GAC’ed and “regular” assemblies. If a
GAC’ed assembly had appeared within the Visual Studio IDE, I’d probably
keep installing assemblies into the GAC unnecessarily until I
eventually learned more about the GAC and CAS. In .NET 2.0 assemblies
installed in the GAC run with full thrust, this makes sense because you
need administrative privileges to install an assembly in the GAC.
Installing assemblies to the GAC just to have them appear in the Add
References dialog could easily lead to gaping security holes in
software.
So now that you know why adding an assembly to
the GAC doesn’t add it to the Add References dialog, I’ll let you know
how to add assemblies to that dialog. You’ve got several options.
- Add
a new key under
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\.NETFramework\v2.0.50727\AssemblyFoldersEx.
If you want an installation only for the current user add the key to
HKEY_CURRENT_USER instead. The value of the key should be the folder
path that you want Visual Studio to look in for assemblies to include
in the Add References dialog. This registry path is specific to VS 2005
and the .NET Framework 2.0 and will not work for previous versions of
VS or the .NET Framework.
- Add a new key under
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\.NETFramework\AssemblyFolders.
The value of the key should be the folder path that you want Visual
Studio to look in for assemblies to include in the Add References
dialog. This registry path is global and any folders listed here will
be processed by VS .NET 2002, VS .NET 2003 and VS 2005 as well as the
.NET Framework 1.0, 1.1 and 2.0. Keep backward compability in mind when
choosing this option.
- Place a copy of your assembly in
the Common7\IDE\PublicAssemblies folder beneath your Visual Studio 2005
installation folder (Typically c:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio
8\). This is not a recommended approach; choose either option 1 or 2 if
you can.