How to Uninstall an Assembly from the GAC
This topic describes how to use the Windows interface or the Gacutil command-line tool to uninstall an assembly from the global assembly cache (GAC). This is necessary to completely undeploy an application. To automate this process, before deploying the application into a production environment, we recommend that you write a pre-processing script that will uninstall the assembly from the GAC automatically when the application is uninstalled. For more information, see Using Pre- and Post-processing Scripts to Customize Application Deployment.
You can also use such a script to remove additional files and settings, as described in How to Remove Other Files and Settings for a BizTalk Application.
To perform the procedures in this topic, you must be logged on an account that has Write permissions on the GAC, which is located at %systemdrive%\Windows\Assembly. The Administrators account on the local computer has this permission. For more detailed information on permissions, see Permissions Required for Deploying and Managing a BizTalk Application.
Using the Windows interface
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Navigate to the GAC, which is located at %systemdrive%\Windows\Assembly.
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Right-click each assembly file that is included in your application, click Uninstall, and then click Yes to confirm.
Using the command line
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Open a Visual Studio command prompt as follows: Click Start, point to All Programs, point to Microsoft Visual Studio 2008, point to Tools, and then click Visual Studio 2008 Command Prompt.
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At the command prompt, type the following command:
gacutil /u <fully qualifiedassembly name>
In this command, assembly name is the name of the assembly to uninstall from the GAC.
The following example removes an assembly named hello.dll from the GAC.
gacutil /u "hello,Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=0123456789ABCDEF"
