Have you ever wanted to or needed to view the actual contents of the GAC? Not just what is in the GAC, but actually grab the assemblies that are there?
I know I have. You may be asking WHY did you want to grab an assembly that is in the GAC. 2 reasons:
I wanted to move a copy of the assmebly from one box onto my dev box.
I wanted to reflect the the assembly to see how it was build to learn something.
Well, fortunately there is a way to do this. It is a pretty simple registry hack that works wonders.
Here is how:
Open RegEdit
Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Fusion
Right click in the viewer and add a new Binary Value
Name your new Binary value DisableCacheViewer
Double click your new entry and given it a value of 1 with Base Hexadecimal
Click OK
Navigate to C:\WINDOWS\assembly
You should see the contents of the folder as sub folders, not the standard GAC Viewer
Hope this helps….. I would be sure to delete or rename this new value AFTER you are done playing around.
**** WARNING **** Any time you modify your registry, you do so at your OWN risk.
Till next time
SAMİ GÖNCÜ 