NGWS SDK Documentation  

This is preliminary documentation and subject to change.
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Locating Assemblies

Of course, in order to find a type within an assembly, the NGWS runtime must be able to find the assembly itself. Without a global registry that can be used to find all assemblies, we must establish a set of default locations and search rules that we use to find assemblies. These search rules can be summarized as follows:

  1. The xml configuration files can be used to specify an explicit path, or codebase, to an assembly. If this information is provided, there is no need for the NGWS runtime to search – we just load the assembly directly from the supplied codebase.
  2. If no codebase is supplied, the NGWS runtime looks on the file system in the application directory for the assembly. A set of search rules are applied, based on the name, version and culture of the assembly.
  3. The final place the NGWS runtime will look is in the global assembly store. Each machine has a store used to hold assemblies that are meant to be shared by multiple applications on the machine.