Yes, I know how it's spelled. But "GAC" doesn't fully demonstrate the wretching feeling I typically get when I'm dealing with it. So I'm trying my hand on some onomatopoeia.

I was recording a Dimecast this morning on S#arp Architecture because it's an awesome piece of work. But one of the things it (currently) does with the VS template is create an MVC project. That is, a project explicitly linked to the MVC template. And if you don't have that template installed, you get at least one error.

So I went about installing the MSI because I was also feeling some pain not having the various MVC item templates anyway. Tried the S@arp template again and all was well for the three hours it took me to record that ten minute webcast.

Then I switched over to the MVC project I'm working on. It uses an older version of MVC, around preview five-ish. Load up the site and an error appears indicating something like "Html.UrlAction doesn't take 5 parameters" or "Exception: Maybe you ought to take up another line of work" or something. Clearly it is using the assemblies from the GAC rather than the bin directory like I told it.

The best option running through my head is to uninstall the assemblies from the GAC. I get to keep my templates but don't have to deal with versioning issues. Unfortunately, as Phil notes, you can't uninstall an assembly from the GAC if it was installed via MSI. Derik Whittaker says I could probably fix it by removing the MVC stuff from the web.config and re-adding it. Too hacky, says I.

My solution: whine to someone who can possibly solve my problem. In this case, the accommodating Billy McCafferty who assures me that S%arp will no longer have a hard dependency on the MVC templates in the near future. Which means I can uninstall MVC and go back to working with my various projects using different versions of the assemblies.

It's temporary though. At the moment, I can't open up the project I created with S~arp anymore. It gives an error: The project type is not supported by this application. (By the way, the solution to this is to open the .csproj file in a text editor and remove {603c0e0b-db56-11dc-be95-000d561079b0}; from the list of ProjectTypeGUIDs at the top.) In any case, S&arp isn't the only project I've dealt with that is explicitly linked to the MVC templates.

I imagine in order to even get the templates to work, the assemblies it uses need to be somewhere relatively global. Whatever, all I know as a user is: I don't want them in my GAC but I still want the project and item templates to work.

Final note: S*arp makes use of T4Toolbox to do some scaffolding. This project doesn't appear to play well with VisualSVN if you happen to have it installed. The problem I believe is with T4Toolbox but don't quote me. I had to uninstall VisualSVN to get the scaffolding to work. Seems related to similar issues with ActiveWriter.

Kyle the Versioned