Installing to the GAC for a custom installer

[Bill Henning]

Hi all... I have been using InstallShield to build our installers for our
products. However I just found out that our version of InstallShield
doesn't support 64-bit deploys and it costs $700 to upgrade to the version
that does.

I really don't need many of the features of a full installer application. I
just essentially want to copy files to a few folders, make several registry
entries, and create a program files group. Also I would like to create
custom installer dialog pages.

I'm not really a fan of MSI either since it's so kludgey.

So I came up with the idea of making a 100% .NET installer since only people
who have .NET will be installing our products anyhow. The problem is that
there doesn't seem to be any easy way to register our assemblies in the GAC.

We could use gacutil but does this mean that we have to include gacutil in
our setup and if we include a specific version (like for the 1.0 .NET
framework), will it not work for installing on machines with the 1.1 or 2.0
frameworks?

Bill

 

[Mattias Sjögren]

Bill,

We could use gacutil but does this mean that we have to include gacutil in
our setup and if we include a specific version (like for the 1.0 .NET
framework), will it not work for installing on machines with the 1.1 or 2.0
frameworks?

I wouldn't recommend using Gacutil for this, I'm not even sure it's
redistributable. There are APIs that are sort of documented here

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=317540

and I have managed wrappers for most of it at

http://www.msjogren.net/dotnet/eng/samples/dotnet_gactool.asp



Mattias

 

[Bill Henning]

Thanks... that's a very useful KB article! And I'll have a look at your
app.

My only question, will those API's work for .NET 1.0, 1.1 and 2.0?

Bill