1/3/2007

The GAC provides many benefits including:

1. Components can be shared by multiple applications.

2. Components placed in the GAC receive special privileges such as file security, shared location and side-by-side versioning.

3. It is more efficient to place assemblies in the GAC because the Common Language Runtime will first try to locate the assembly in the GAC before looking in the config file for <codebase> or <probing> elements.