I thought I was starting to understand the GAC but evidently not in Win7. I have VS2008 and VS2010 installed on this box. SF 1.707. c:\Windows\assembly shows nothing in explorer. c:\windows\Microsoft.NET\assembly shows no files but GAC_32 and GAC_MSIL folders which contain many many subfolders with what appears to be all core .net stuff.



I see no Microfour folder.



I had dxExperience 10.1.5 eval installed (successfully) but never notice where it was located in GAC. tried to uninstall and uninstall failed as it said it could not uninstall the stuff in the GAC. I still can't find where the files are.



Ran the gacutil.exe /l (both the new 4.0 version and the older version ) and they showed 0 files. My sf apps are showing warnings that the some of my references are to sf dlls in program files and some to the GAC (though the token keys are identical and everything compiles and deploys correctly)



Anybody actually understand this stuff?



TIA

Hi Charles.

Something funny must be going on over there (or here with me ) but mine are where they've always been: C:\Windows\assembly. I also have Infragistics, and they are all there.

OK, that is where I expected to see them but I see nothing there in Win7 explorer and GACUtil shows nothing there either, though SF continues to work (running from the dlls in Program files, I assume.)



I'm really confused on this one. DevExpress won't install or uninstall now. Weird. I'm going to have to dig into this deeper, I guess. I just wanted to confirm that I should expect to see the SF (and other 3rd party) dlls in the windows\assembly folder.

It looks like there are many people facing issues... here is one of the many links I got, it might help you:

http://clientsupport.curse.com/ticket.aspx?id=2037

This one took a lot of googling, so i want to share the answer here hoping to save others some pain :



Evidently, possibly under low memory conditions the IndexingService (CISVC) gets turned off and this effective locks the GAC - even to where you see no files there in Explorer or with GACUtil.exe.



It doesn't just STOP the service - it turns it off like it was never installed. At that point, nothing can be installed or removed from the GAC, so any install that needs to do that will fail.



Rebooting doesn't fix it, but going to control panel\programs and features\turn windows features on an off will let you check indexing service and then after a reboot you can see the GAC again, installs and uninstalls needing the GAC will work and all is well.



Indexing Service is the key to the whole thing. If it is not running, GAC gets locked and invisible.

Glad you got it working!