Want to see GAC in its naked view?

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For one of my customer's debugging scenario, I was searching for a technique to view the GAC in its simple file-folder view. (For those of you who does not know GAC [C:\windows\assembly] is just a decorated view implemented in shfusion.dll in framework folder.. Refer to [https://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/34149zk3(vs.80).aspx] for more information.

So, there are two tricks to see GAC in its file-folder (naked) view! One is somewhat longer which I am not going to describe here, another is barely creating one registry key!

You can simply go to,
HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Fusion

and create a DWORD value named "DisableCacheViewer" and set it to value 1.

Just go ahead and open another instance of windows explorer, explore to c:\windows\assembly now and you see magic there!! Directory structure inside assembly folder is also very logical, but some other time, will write a post on it.

Stay tuned.. Wave