SharePoint 2010 Web Front End Application Server dll deployment

Question

We have a SharePoint farm configured with one SQL server, an Application server and one Web Front End. All assemblies run from the GAC on the WFE, except one. This one dll has to be forced (using gacutil) into the GAC on the App server in order to see changes in our SharePoint application.

My question is, what determines that this dll must run on the App server and not with the rest on the WFE? I assume because of this, I cannot debug in Visual Studio from the WFE. Do I have to install Visual Studio on the App server as well?

Answer 1

When setting up a timer job, it's possible to use the constructor to specify a specific server. That's likely how things got set up for this solution and associated .dll file. More info on that here:

http://www.martinhatch.com/2009/08/sharepoint-timer-jobs-and-multiple.html

As for adding Visual Studio to servers on your farm, if this is your production farm I do not recommend doing this. If you really need to debug in production (you really, really should have a development box set up for this), do it via remote debugging.