ASP.NET application and GAC

[Amelyan]

What is the deal with ASP.NET and signed assemblies? I have experienced
some weird behavior of my web application where it looked like my asp.net
application wasn't even looking into GAC. Then, I saw a brief mention on
the web "ASP.NET doesn't pick up signed assesmblies from GAC".

Does anyone who knows can give more explanation?

Thanks,
Amelyan

 

[Guest]

ASP.NET picks up signed assemblies just fine, at least for me it does.

Are you dynamically loading the assembly? If you are, make sure that you're
using the fully qualified type i.e. Version, Culture and PublicKeyToken.

You'll also want to include this information (in the section element in the
configSections node) if the GAC'd assembly has a class that implements
IConfigurationSectionHandler.

 

[Amelyan]

I statically link the assembly to my project and it doesn't implement
IConfigurationSectionHandler. Usually, GAC is the first place where .net
application searches for its assemblies. However, this doesn't seem to be
the case with ASP.NET applications.

Do you know why?

Thanks,
Amelyan

 

[Guest]

I'm at a loss. Is this a problem when deploying the application?

You have gacutil'd the assemblies, right? I sometimes overlook this when
deploying new GAC'd assemblies.

Good luck.

 

[Amelyan]

No, this is not when I deploy the application.

1) I rebuild my strongly signed assemblies.
a) I have a post build step that automatically "gacutils" them after
every build. I verified that it works.
2) I rebuild my WebApplication and run it from Visual Studio.

However, VisualStudio picks up dlls, not from GAC, but from some special
directory C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322\Temporary ASP.NET
Files\ where it seems to cache them. The error I get, lists the version of
assembly that it is trying to load, and that is the version that resides
only in that Temporary ASP.NET Files folder, and nowhere else.

Moreover, sometimes, when I run my WebApplication from VisualStudio it picks
up WebApplication.dll, not from my project's bin, but from that same
temporary Asp.Net Files folder.

Amelyan