GAC Hell Aug 24 2005

As much as I love working with .Net, some things about it still leave a lot to be desired. Specifically, M$’s claims that the days of DLL hell are over. Sure, they have done away with binary compatibility, but thanks to the GAC, I have to deal with an all new type of hell. GAC hell. Sure, a central cache is nice, until you need to work out why a specific assembly doesn’t appear to be ‘taking effect’ once deployed, or simply why you are getting TypeLoad exception’s and the like. I’m sure when used as is probably outlined in some M$ whitepaper somewhere, it will work as intended. However for normal use, the GAC isn’t at all intuitive and useful. And ofcourse, I could just not use it… except for the fact that assemblies with certain types in it (specifically IServicedComponents that proxy to a different machine), seem intent on installing themselves in the GAC. There are probably others that do the same. Argghhh!