Referencing assemblies in GAC

I found out that you can't actually refer to assemblies from the GAC directly. So in development, you need to add reference to the physical assemblies (wherever that assemblies are located), set "Copy Local" to false and at run time, the CLS will load the assembly reference from the GAC.

More information here:

http://www.eggheadcafe.com/PrintSearchContent.asp?LINKID=1175
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/dotnet/demystifygac.aspx

Running DOS batch file from UNC path

My DOS batch install file broke when I tried running them from a UNC path. It says: "CMD does not support UNC paths as current directories". Old error message but new to me. Make sense since DOS was around before the UNC path era.

Turn out that there is a solution, not the cleanest but it works. Basically you have to do this:


pushd "%~dp0"

REM ... do your stuff

popd


What pushd does is automatically map the given parameter as a drive and popd removes the mapping. Not the best solution, but a working one. And the "%~dp0" parameter gets you the current directory of the batch file.