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Investigating the Internal Composition of the GAC

At this point, you have deployed and configured private and shared assemblies. Before we turn to

the topic of publisher policy, let’s investigate the internal composition of the GAC itself. When you

view the GAC using Windows Explorer, you find a number of icons representing each version of a

shared assembly. This graphical shell is provided courtesy of a COM server named shfusion.dll. As

you may suspect, however, beneath these icons is an elaborate (but predictable) directory structure.

To understand what the GAC really boils down to, open a command prompt and change to the

Assembly directory:

cd c:\windows\assembly

Issue a dir command from the command line. Here you will find a folder named GAC_MISL

(see Figure 15-26).

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