Programming .NET Components, 2nd Edition

Visual Studio 2005 and Versioning

The shared assemblies in the GAC are readily available for any client application to use. However, using Visual Studio 2005, there is no easy way to extract the server metadata from a shared assembly in the GAC to compile a client application. To build a client assembly, the client project must be given access to the server metadata. That means that somewhere on the client machine (usually in the server project, if you develop both server and client) there must be a copy of the server assembly.

When you use Visual Studio 2005 to add a reference to a server assembly, Visual Studio 2005 copies the referenced server assembly to the client directory by default. This constitutes a private server assembly for the use of the client assembly. You can, of course, manually remove that private copy of the server assembly, but there is a better way: you can instruct Visual Studio 2005 to only use metadata from the server assembly, and not to copy the assembly to the client directory. This enables compilation on the one hand and loading the shared assembly from the GAC on the other. For example, suppose a client assembly wants to use the shared assembly MySharedAssembly. The file MySharedAssembly.dll is already installed in the GAC and is available in some other location. First, add a reference to MySharedAssembly.dll using the Add Reference dialog box. This copies the assembly locally to the client directory and adds an item called MySharedAssembly to the client’s ...