WebGAC Takes the Pain Out of .Net Dependencies

My good friend Paul Jones, has released a great tool called WebGAC to github.  WebGAC is a great way to manage .net assemblies and adding them to .Net projects from a centralised repository of binaries.  As someone who has used this tool on literally dozens of projects for nearly 2 years now, Its a must have tool for all Visual Studio developers.

Managing binary dependencies in .NET can be a complicated task. For small projects, checking the dependencies into source control tends to work just fine. So does requesting that all developers have various binaries available in their GAC. Grow much bigger, or add more projects, and managing that starts to get very difficult. The Java world has had a solution to this problem for a long time, in the form of Maven and Ivy. Remote servers store the binaries, and the build tool automatically downloads them on demand.

WebGAC adds the core of this functionality to .NET, but without requiring you to switch build tools, or maintain a separate configuration file. Dependencies are specified just the same way as normal, but if you don’t have them when building your project, WebGAC will fetch them for you automatically.

WebGAC is available at http://github.com/paulj/webgac. Browse over there for more information and installation instructions, or continue reading here for more details.

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