Friday, June 27, 2008

What is GAC (Twist :- What are situations when you register .NET assembly in GAC ?) ?

GAC (Global Assembly Cache) is used where shared .NET assembly reside. GAC is used in the following situations :-

· If the application has to be shared among several application.

· If the assembly has some special security requirements like only administrator scan remove the assembly. If the assembly is private then a simple delete of assembly the assembly file will remove the assembly. Note :- Registering .NET assembly in GAC can lead to the old problem of DLL hell, where COM version was stored in central registry. So GAC should be used when absolutely necessary.