GAC'ed assembly storage location?

Question

When you deploy a feature with assemblies that get registered in the GAC, where do these assemblies get stored? I thought this would be an easy thing to find, but apparently my Bing-foo is weak today.

P.S. I tried to add tag's "GAC" and "assembly", but they didn't exist and I can't create new tags.

Answer 1

As Ari says they are located in c:\windows\assembly, but if you browse that folder using Windows Explorer you will see a custom UI which shows the GAC. If you use PowerShell, a command prompt or other applications such as Total Commander (my favorite) you will see that c:\windows\assembly contains a set of other folders where the actual assemblies are stored. Do not manually add, edit or remove assemblies in there! Use GACUTIL if you need to manually register/unregister them.

Answer 2

You can see the files in the Global Assembly Cache by browsing to %windir%\assembly\ (e.g. C:\Windows\assembly)

Answer 3

Or you can use the registry editor and set the value of key - [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE]\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Fusion\DisableCacheViewer to 1. This will enable browsing in the GAC. Set it back to 0 and the normal GAC view will return. Personally I use powershell to set this value when I need to browse.

Answer 4

Have a look at this thread on Stack Overflow.