Can An Assembly Be Installed In The GAC but not Show Up In Gacutil.exe?

Question

I've got an application where some assemblies are copied to C:\Windows\assembly upon deployment under the assumption that this installs them in the GAC. The application seems to work but when I run gacutil.exe on the copied assemblies, it says the Global Assembly Cache contains 0 assemblies.

Should all assemblies in c:\Windows\assembly show up in gacutil? If not, why not? How can I verify that the assembly is in fact installed in the GAC?

I have always used gacutil.exe in the past to register assemblies so doing a file copy is new to me and I'm trying to understand the ramifications.

Answer 1

Surprisingly yes, but this would be an abuse of the internals of how the GAC works so don't do that.