Visual Basic 2015 Unleashed

The Global Assembly Cache

The .NET Framework consists of hundreds of libraries and tools. Most libraries implement the Base Class Library. The BCL’s assemblies are located in GAC. This is the reason you can be sure a .NET application requiring only base assemblies can correctly work on a target machine that has the .NET Framework installed. The GAC can be considered as a repository of shared assemblies. This means that an application can have a reference to an assembly available in the GAC instead of bringing its own copy of the assembly as happens in the XCopy deployment. The GAC is a folder in the system and is located at C:\Windows\Assembly. Because of the particular nature of this folder, its representation within Windows Explorer is a little ...