Stumbled upon "Assembly fabrikam could not be uninstalled because it is required by other applications"

Ever struck with this nasty error message from GAC while uninstalling a library




Actually we were experimenting MSI installers to deploy some of our prerequisite libraries to global assembly cache to save some time on preparing the deployment scrips. I've been using these dlls which were deployed using installers in my dev environment. When I tried to uninstall these libraries, I was beating the bush around with this error message.

It leads to learning of traced reference count on assemblies here. The quick fix is to open the registry, navigate to the following hierarchies and remove your assembly entries

[HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Installer\Assemblies\Global]

[HKLM\SOFTWARE\Classes\Installer\Assemblies\Global]

Lessons learnt : Don't try MSI installers on an environment where you do a very frequent patch releases (of course in Dev Environment too). Stick to the basic Gacutil tool

Retrieve list of assemblies from GAC

Did you ever want to retrieve a list of assemblies along with their version in Global assembly cache? This will be helpful whenever we make system wide patching or updating to understand what changes happened in GAC or in case if you are troubleshooting on some other client machine if you want the version info of set of assemblies in that remote box quickly

Then this utility is a must in your toolbox(DumpUtil.exe). This console line application gives us a dump like the following

Sample output text from DumpUtil.exe
...
System.dll (1.1.4322.2407)
System.Configuration.Install.dll (1.1.4322.573)
System.Data.dll (1.1.4322.2365)
System.Data.OracleClient.dll (1.1.4322.2312)
System.Design.dll (1.1.4322.2300)
System.DirectoryServices.dll (1.1.4322.2300)
System.Drawing.dll (1.1.4322.2327)
System.Drawing.Design.dll (1.1.4322.573)
System.EnterpriseServices.dll (1.1.4322.2326)
System.EnterpriseServices.Thunk.dll (1.1.4322.2326)
...

Related link: http://aravindrises.blogspot.com/2008/08/want-to-take-dll-backup-from-gac.html