ASP.NET MVC: Bin Deploying V1 and Beta on same server

Question

Hello,

I have ASP.NET MVC Beta on our web server running a few apps. My latest app is getting close to done and it uses the Version 1 of ASP.NET MVC.

My idea was I could bin deploy the V1 assemblies and leave Beta installed so it was used by default. This idea doesn't work as it ignores the bin folder and grabs from the GAC (both are version 1.0.0.0). Instead I copied the Beta MVC dlls to the bin directories of the applications that were built using Beta and uninstalled Beta MVC which removed the dll's from the GAC.

I then went to a page using Beta MVC which had the Beta dll's in its bin directory and got an error that it couldn't find the system.web.mvc dll in the GAC. Of course it couldn't, I removed them and placed them in the bins folder!

So I'm a bit stumped.

Is there a way I can force a web application to look in its bin directory versus the GAC?

Answer 1

I really think you're looking the wrong way. Instead of trying hard to get both beta and v1 on the server - assuming that you have the source of all the applications running on the server and that you're not just providing hosting services - I believe you should try and invest in updating the few lines of code that might need intervention to achieve full compatibility of the applications still relying on the beta assemblies. Anyway you should probably add the iis tag to the question...