I have a .NET assembly that (for reasons outside my control) must be in the GAC. However, the same assembly is used by another program, which has a its own copy of an older version of the same assembly. It must use its own copy and not whatever is in the GAC. Proper versioning is probably more hassle than it's worth in this case, for reasons I won't go into. My questions is: is there anyway to tell .NET: just use THIS DLL, right here in this directory – ignore whatever you find in the GAC or anywhere else.
.net – How to force .NET to use a local copy of an assembly that’s in the GAC
gacnet
Related Solutions
I've defined the following property as we use this often in unit testing.
public static string AssemblyDirectory
{
get
{
string codeBase = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().CodeBase;
UriBuilder uri = new UriBuilder(codeBase);
string path = Uri.UnescapeDataString(uri.Path);
return Path.GetDirectoryName(path);
}
}
The Assembly.Location property sometimes gives you some funny results when using NUnit (where assemblies run from a temporary folder), so I prefer to use CodeBase which gives you the path in URI format, then UriBuild.UnescapeDataString removes the File:// at the beginning, and GetDirectoryName changes it to the normal windows format.
Add the following values to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Fusion Add: DWORD ForceLog set value to 1 DWORD LogFailures set value to 1 DWORD LogResourceBinds set value to 1 DWORD EnableLog set value to 1 String LogPath set value to folder for logs (e.g. C:\FusionLog\)
Make sure you include the backslash after the folder name and that the Folder exists.
You need to restart the program that you're running to force it to read those registry settings.
By the way, don't forget to turn off fusion logging when not needed.
Best Answer
Make sure the GAC Assembly and local Assembly have different version numbers (not a bad idea to let your build number, at least, auto-increment by wild-carding your AssemblyVersion in AssemblyInfo: [assembly: AssemblyVersion("1.0.0.*")] ). Then, redirect your assembly binding using your app's config:
In your case, you won't need the "appliesTo" attribute of the assemblyBinding config. You just need something like: