Is there an easier way to view/search what is in the GAC?

Question

I know that Microsoft states to run

gacutil -l

from the VS command prompt to get a list.

However I am dealing with this.

So when I run the list the display contents are all over the window and I have a total of 1649 items in the gac.
In this case I do now know what Oracal dll I need to remove. So is there an easier way to view/search what is in the GAC?

Answer 1

Searching in c:\windows\assembly is not going to help as from .net 4.0 on wards there is a different location (%windir%\Microsoft.NET\assembly) for GAC.

See here .NET 4.0 has a new GAC, why?

gacutil is the way to go as it searches in both the locations i.e. %systemroot%\assembly and %windir%\Microsoft.NET\assembly\

For your issue you can try

gacutil -l Oracle.DataAccess (Oracle.DataAccess.dll is what I remember gets installed for Oracle Data Provider for .NET)

However above command doesn't support wild card so the assembly name should exactly match.

A hack would be to pipe the result to find command and then apply filters

gacutil.exe -l | find /I "oracle" (make sure VS command prompt is opened in admin mode)

Answer 2

You can use Windows Explorer to browse the GAC. Open it up and navigate to %systemroot%\assembly:

You can see various details of each assembly, and pressing Del will prompt you if you want to uninstall the assembly.