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VS won't reference assemblies in GAC

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This is by design.

 The reason is that assemblies installed in YOUR development machine is not necessary the same as what your application requires. Let VS to reference assemblies installed in your development machine is clearly not the right thing.

An analogy to unmanaged developement. VS search %INCLUDE % for header files, and %LIB% for lib files. It does not search %PATH% for those things.

Same applies to managed development. For managed assemblies, there are no header or lib files. Everything is contained in the assembly itself. Adding a reference to your VS really means looking for those metadatas.

Use the unmanaged development analogy, VS won't look at GAC for it.

Yes, maybe we do need headers for managed assemblies.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    March 22, 2004
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    March 22, 2004
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    October 20, 2004
    If you want to add assemblies to the 'Add Reference' dialog in Visual Studio .NET, and your assemblies don't already have homes, use Andrew Troelsen's method. If your assemblies already have homes, though, use this method to add them wherever...