When and when-not to install into the GAC?

by

General MS guidelines

  1. no
  2. no
  3. no

GAC is really a repository for Microsoft common .NET libraries. Yes, they let developers use it too, but as a rule of thumb, if you don’t need GAC, don’t use it. keep things simple and local if it doesn’t hurt.

  • I would consider GAC only for performance reasons, for example if you have some huge assemblies, try to place them into GAC and NGEN them. It should significantly increase performance. Microsoft does it for all standard .NET framework assemblies during installation (now you know why that installation takes so long). Paint.NET does it as well (to improve startup time of their app). However most of us don’t work on huge frameworks or photoshop competitors, so most of the time, performance gains from having assembly in GAC are minimal. Not worth giving up simple x-copy deployment.

  • Some developers might use GAC to make sure that users with insufficient privileges can’t delete or modify their assemblies.

  • For others it might be for versioning reasons but here you should really reconsider. I’m not going to repeat what has been already said, you can read here why.

And don’t forget that once you want to deploy into GAC, your installer will need administrator privileges, you can pretty much forget click-once deployment, etc…

More Related Contents:

  1. What’s the ‘correct’ way of registering/installing an Assembly to the GAC?
  2. Uninstalling an MSI file from the command line without using msiexec
  3. How do I detect what .NET Framework versions and service packs are installed?
  4. How to make a .NET Windows Service start right after the installation?
  5. .NET 4.0 has a new GAC, why?
  6. How do I run Visual Studio as an administrator by default?
  7. When should I deploy my assemblies into the GAC?
  8. How to modify .NET config files during installation?
  9. What are the advantages and disadvantages of using the GAC?
  10. How to get COM Server for Excel written in VB.NET installed and registered in Automation Servers list?
  11. Is there any GAC equivalent for .NET Core?
  12. How can I force .NET to use a local copy of an assembly that’s in the GAC
  13. What is the GAC in .NET?
  14. Error message “Unable to install or run the application. The application requires stdole Version 7.0.3300.0 in the GAC”
  15. Use Visual Studio Setup Project to automatically register and GAC a COM Interop DLL
  16. How do I launch an application after install in a Visual Studio Setup Project
  17. Windows SDK 7.1 Setup failure
  18. Drag and drop a DLL to the GAC (“assembly”) in windows server 2008 .net 4.0
  19. .NET 4 fails to install because SECUREREPAIR fails to CreateContentHash of file SetupResources.dll: for computing hash Error: 997
  20. /LinkResource in Visual Studio 2010
  21. When using PresentationFramework.Aero, do I need to set “Copy Local” to true (and include it in my setup project)?
  22. Does the .Net Framework 4.0 Installer include the .Net Framework 3.5?
  23. LINQ to Entities does not recognize the method
  24. store image in database or in a system file? [closed]
  25. How to serialize an object to XML without getting xmlns=”…”?
  26. WPF Data Binding and Validation Rules Best Practices
  27. Why doesn’t ClickOnce in Visual Studio deploy content files from dependent assemblies?
  28. How to package a portable .NET library targeting .NET Core?
  29. What version of .NET ships with what version of Windows?
  30. Serializing a list of Key/Value pairs to XML

Leave a Comment