Marko Apfel
Tools

Accessing GAC-files in Explorer without registry hacks

Problem If you go in Explorer to the GAC folder (%windir%\Assembly) a shell extension gives you a special view of the content there: In this view you couldn’...

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Problem

If you go in Explorer to the GAC folder (%windir%\Assembly) a shell extension gives you a special view of the content there:

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In this view you couldn’t copy the DLLs to somewhere else.

Solution

  1. With a special registry intervention you could deactivate the shell extension so that Explorer shows the content in a normal way. But this is like a hack.
  2. If you are practiced with command line you could go to the assembly folder image
  3. And the smartest with explorer is to map a network drive to \<your machine>\c$\windows\assembly
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    and so you have access to your assemblies over the new drive: image