Question

I was wondering, if I deploy a WSP using the stsadm command:

 stsadm -o addsolution –filename myWSP.wsp

Will this also install the required DLL’s (already included in the WSP) into the GAC?

Or is this another manual process?

Answer 1

This is determined by the DeploymentTarget attribute in the solution’s manifest.xml. If you are maintaining this file yourself, using the following syntax will deploy the code to the GAC:

<Assemblies>
   <Assembly DeploymentTarget="GlobalAssemblyCache" 
             Location="MyGAC.dll" />
</Assemblies>

If you are using a tool to create the solution, it depends on the tool. WSPBuilder defaults to deploying to the GAC however it can be configured otherwise. See the “Scoping the assembly for BIN instead of GAC (including Code Access Security generation)” section of this article by Tobias Zimmergren for steps on how to deploy to bin.