I tend to spend a lot of time adding assemblies to the GAC (Global Assembly Cache) in order to run unit tests or work with BizTalk Server assemblies. Usually, I'll do this using the Visual Studio command prompt or the .Net configuration tool. I wanted to find a marginally quicker way to add assemblies to the GAC so I started to look at the 'Send To' menu.
In order to add shortcuts to your 'Send To', simply navigate to the following folder:
- C:\Documents and Settings\<User Name>\SendTo
In here you can create simple shortcuts to applications. So for example you can add a 'Send To Notepad' shortcut. I'm not going to go in to all of the detail of creating a shortcut here though.
What I wanted to do was add shortcut to gacutil.exe. The first thing to think about is where Microsoft decided to put the thing in your particular version of .Net. To help you here, I created a little list of places that you are likely to find gacutil.exe for different versions of the framework
| Framework Version | Possible Locations |
| 1.0 | C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.0.3705 |
| 1.1 | C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322 |
| 2.0 | C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\SDK\v2.0\bin\ |
| 3.0 | C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A\bin (not too sure about this one) |
| 3.5 | C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A\bin |
Once you've located your gacutil.exe, create a shortcut to it in the SendTo folder mentioned above. In order to get it to work, simply modify the target of the shortcut so that there is a '/i' at the end of the target (outside of the quotes) as in the following diagram:
That should do it, from now on you should get the following in your context menu:
