There are occasions where you may need to grab an assembly that is held in the Global Assembly Cache (GAC), maybe so that you can deploy it as a private application assembly.
Browsing to the GAC using Windows Explorer (C:\Windows\assembly) it uses a special explorer plug-in to display the assembly names and versions. This plug-in does not allow you to extract/copy and paste the assembly.
However, if you browsed to the GAC using a network mapped drive, this plug-in is not enabled! So, by mapping to \\machineName\c$\windows\assembly you’ll now have access to the raw assemblies.
Advertisement
