The Global Assembly Cache
The .NET Framework consists of hundreds of libraries and tools. Most libraries implement the Base Class Library and BCL’s assemblies are located in GAC. This is the reason why you can be sure that a .NET application requiring only base assemblies can correctly work on a target machine having the .NET Framework installed. The GAC can be considered as a repository of shared assemblies; shared means that an application can simply have a reference to an assembly available in the GAC instead of bringing its own copy of the assembly as happens in the XCopy deployment. The GAC is basically a folder in the system and is generally located at C:\Windows\Assembly. Because of the particular nature of this folder, its representation ...
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