GACing Assemblies in Windows 7 / .NET 4.0 / Visual Studio 2010

Before an assembly can be GACed, you need a strong name key. Open up the Visual Studio Command Prompt (2010) in administrator mode and type in:

sn -k c:\temp\MyKey.snk

Run Visual Sutdio 2010 in administrator mode and view the project’s properties. Under the Signing tab, check the Sign the assembly checkbox and choose your newly created key. Under the Build Events tab, add this under Post-build event command line:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.0A\Bin\NETFX 4.0 Tools\gacutil.exe" /i
"$(TargetPath)"

Now when you build your project, the assembly will be automatically GACed. Note that you need to run Visual Studio in administrator mode so that the post-build command will run. You can view your GACed assemblies at C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\assembly\GAC_MSIL.