Visual Studio ext registration GAC or Codebase ?

Question

I have been confused with some extensibility features in visual studio, one feature need to register assembly using regasm /codebase, and other need to put in GAC.

My questions are simple :

• Are those two ways acctually same and accepted in visual studion ext. features or that is the common .NET way to provide COM interop ?
• If that different, which extension features need to using regasm /codebase, and which extension need to put in GAC

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It's hard to be advanced programmer

Answer 1

Hi,

Extensions don't need to be registered in the GAC. There are two kind of registrations:

1) All extensions: need to be registered within Visual Studio through some mechanism that depend on the extension. For example:

- COM-based add-ins use a registry entry (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\<version>\AddIns\<ProgId>

- XML-based add-ins use an .AddIn file in some predefined folders

- Packages use .pkgdef files

- Etc.

2) Only COM-based extensions: apart from the previous registration, they need to be registered for COM-Interop with regasm.exe with /codebase (and therefore signed with a strong name).

The bottom line is that extensions don't need to be deployed to the GAC.

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MZ-Tools: Productivity add-ins for Visual Studio: http://www.mztools.com. My blog about developing add-ins: http://msmvps.com/blogs/carlosq/