Assembly Versioning

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Vector replied on 10-10-2004 9:16 PM

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I will not go into the details of why should assemblies be versioned as the advantage are obvious, however this post will outline the no-nonsense way to implement versioning in your assemblies today:

Prerequisites:

1. Before an assembly can be versioned, it has to be strong named.

How-to:

1. Create a new class library project.
2. Go to VS.NET command prompt, and go to the project folder.
3. Type sn -k privatekeyFileName.snk (This will create a key pair for strong naming your assembly)
4. Go to your project, open the AssemblyInfo.cs file, scroll down to the following tabs and set the AssemblyKeyFile name

         [assembly: AssemblyDelaySign(false)]

         [assembly: AssemblyKeyFile("..\\..\\privatekeyFileName.snk")]

         [assembly: AssemblyKeyName("")]

5. In AssemblyInfo.cs, go to following key and set the version of the assembly

         [assembly: AssemblyVersion("1.0.0.0")]

6. Build the project. You have a versioned strong-named assembly.

Post-build: Caution

     1. A strong-named assembly may be installed in the global assembly cache as it is the only storage system currently which support version-aware storage. If you try to copy a new version assembly into a folder where an older version exists, you will have to overwrite the old file as normal windows folders do not support versioning.

2. To install the assembly in GAC, Open VS.NET command prompt, go to project's bin folder, and type gacutil -I assemblyname.dll
3. After many versions have been installed, to check which of them are in gacutil, type gacutil -l assemblyname

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Vector replied on 10-10-2004 11:58 PM

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When u reference an assembly, during runtime the following process takes place to locate the assembly:

1. Check the assembly manifest to find the version of the assembly that is referenced
2. Check the app.config to see if it overrides the version in the manifest
3. Check the publisher policy file in GAC to see if it overrides the app.config version and manifest
4. Check the machine.config to see if it overrides the app.config, publisher policy file, and manifest.

Once the version has been determined, the assembly is searched in the following locations:

5. Check in GAC
6. Check in the location specified by the optional codebase element in app.config , which is overridden by publisher policy file which is in turn, overridden by machine.config
7. Probe for the assembly given the type of reference of the assembly: if the culture is included

[application base] / [culture] / [assembly name].dll

[application base] / [culture] / [assembly name] / [assembly name].dll

8. If culture is not included, it probes in

[application base] / [assembly name].dll

[application base] / [assembly name] / [assembly name].dll

9. Lastly it also probes in the private bin path. If culture is defined,

[application base] / [binpath] / [culture] / [assembly name].dll

[application base] / [binpath] / [culture] / [assembly name] / [assembly name].dll

10. If culture is not defined,

[application base] / [binpath] / [assembly name].dll

[application base] / [binpath] / [assembly name] / [assembly name].dll