.NET Assembly Deployment with MSIs

[John]

Hi,

There's this big thing about MSIs being able to
automatically add to the Global Assembly Cache (GAC)
any .NET Assembly, without you running the gacutil tool,
which they now deem obsolete.

But if anyone really managed to do this, please let me
know. All I managed to make my MSI do is add a reference
count to my DLL, but I couldn't convince it that I really
want it to be deployed in the GAC. Actually, I couldn't
get it deployed anywhere else, not even as a private
assembly.

I'm manually authoring my MSIs, so if anyone out there
has an MSI that managed to deploy .NET Assemblies (NOT
Win32 Assemblies), I'd be glad if they could send it over
so I can have a look at it. Also, if anyone knows how to
edit the MsiAssembly (esp. the File_Manifest column) and
MsiAssemblyName tables for this particular purpose,
please let me know.

Yours,
John

[David Barnard]

It works. (It's a mess, though.) The best advice I can give you is to
compare a setup created by Visual Studio to the one you are creating
manually (use Orca).

Without checking, I think the correct thing to do is point the File_Manifest
field to the executable, and set the File_Application field to null. Crazy,
but what can you do?

David

"John" <soft...@softhome.net> wrote in message
news:69be01c35844$5bfd8e70$a001...@phx.gbl...

[Phil Wilson]

If you're writing assemblies you must have Visual Studio.Net or above, so create a Setup and
Deployment Project, select the project in Solution Explorer, menu View, Editor File System.
Right-click File System on Target Machine, add special folder the GAC, then put your assembly in
there. Build the MSI file and look at those tables.
--
Phil Wilson [MVP Windows Installer]
----

"John" <soft...@softhome.net> wrote in message news:69be01c35844$5bfd8e70$a001...@phx.gbl...

[John]

Yes, it worked after all. Thank you and David for helping
me out.

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