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GACUtil missing in Windows Server 2008/Visual Studio 2008 installation

I was testing Visual Studio 2008 on Windows Server 2008 for my research and development (sharepoint). Later I need to configure a post build for my class library in Visual Studio 2008. I need to set up the path as below:

"%programfiles%\[PATH_WHERE_THIS_TOOL_TO_BE_INSTALLED]\gacutil.exe" -if $(TargetPath)
cd $(ProjectDir)
Install.bat

So I decided to look for the GACUtil.exe's path. I searched into directories below and I was suprised that I wasn't able to find it:

** Take note, the file should be on the 1st path below based on Visual Studio 2005 installation

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\SDK\v3.5\Bin // NOT FOUND

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0 // NOT FOUND

C:\Program Files\Microsoft.NET // NOT FOUND

Then I searched into C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework and found out gacutil.exe.config which was based on .NET 1.1. That was quite old. There was no gacutil.exe in there.

Where could the file be? I tried to search the whole C:\ and I had yet to find anything. Maybe I didn't index my search properly. Running on VPC 2007 and allocating 1GB of RAM were insufficient :(

I was able to run gacutil command in Visual Studio 2008 Command Prompt.

Lastly, I found out gacutil was located in C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A\bin. This folder contains other assemblies like sn.exe.

Hope this could be handy for others :)

10 Comments

  • Awesome, thanks for this... I was beginning to think i was the first to come across this issue!!!

  • Thanks for the tip! I just installed VS 2008 and wondered where that went.

  • hmm... where can i find it if I dont have VS 2008 installed on the windows 2008

  • Hi Mat, did you install .NET Framework 3.5 on your windows server 2008?

  • I dont have VS 2008 or VS 2005 installed on my machine. Neither do I have the Microsoft SDK folder ... !!!!

    Would I need to install .Net Framework 3.0 or above to get gacutil.exe.

    This is basically a production box.

    Please help

  • I also had this as an issue on Windows7/Visual Studio 2008. Thanks for the tip.

  • THANKS !!!!

    Vista - VS2008 - WSS3 - .NET 3.5 SP1

    Saved some of my hair.

  • I was trying to uninstall infragistics who placed a lot of dll's in the gac. The uninstall programm could not find the GACutil so the dll's were not removed. So I copied GACUtil.exe into C:\Windows from C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322\gacutil.exe. Now it was uninstalled as expected.

  • This is so helpful!! For Production Box, if you don't have it, you may copy from your development box(the gacutil.exe) and paste it in c:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.Net\Framework\v3.5 . Change the path in command prompt as cd c:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.Net\Framework\v3.5 and try installing your dll as gacutil -i dll(don't forget to specify the correct path to dll here!)

  • Thanks a lot. It helped me.

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