We have an Entity Framework project with several models set up using .NET 4 and VS2010. Then we have several projects that need to use this entity project. We successfully compiled the EF project into a DLL. We have also successfully added the EF dll reference into multiple projects which is working great.
The problem is now that we have several programs (ASP.NET and console apps) that reference this EF dll and the dll is copied locally for each calling program, when we make a change to the EF dll, we then have to go into each and every project and replace the EF dll with the new build.
I've done a lot of searching for sharing libraries and even EF projects across multiple projects. While I have found several, I can't seem to find a good example that I can make work for my situation or that isn't so old that it's irrelevant.
That is the general issue I'm having. To give a better idea of the issues I'm encountering, I will focus on one particular project. This is an ASP.NET webform project for in intranet. If we add the EF dll reference and allow the project to copy the dll locally, the EF works fantastically. However, because we have multiple project we now need to try and centralize the EF dll somewhere where it can be shared by the multiple processes. I am not trying to set this up so that one EF dll is accessed across multiple server. I am happy to install a copy of the DLL on individual servers if necessary.
My desire is to create a "common libraries" directory on each server, simplified example "C:\OurLibraries". We would then put or EF dlls (and maybe others later) into this folder and allow the various programs/processes to access the common copy of the EF dll. I've made sure the "local copy" of the EF dll has been removed from the intranet project and added a reference to the "C:\OurLibraries\OurEF.dll" file. Everything builds fine and the intranet project works fine until it tries to display a page that has references the EF and then displays an error message:
"Could not load type 'EntityNS.ProductDBEntity'."
If I turn on "local copy" in the reference, the intranet site works fine again. I cannot seem to find that magic setting that will allow me to share the EF dll.
I have tried the following things based on various posts, but with no success:
Signing the assembly and adding to the GAC. Experienced the same issue as having it in "C:\OurLibraries"
Adding the "C:\OurLibraries" directory to the PATH environment variable.
Changed my connection string for the EF in my intranet web.config file to remove the "OR's" from the string:
/Ecomedate.csdl|res:///Ecomedate.ssdl|res:///Ecomedate.msl;provider=System...
to
;provider=System...
(based on this post: Sharing Entity framework objects across projects?)
I've spent many hours working on this and searching forums and posts. I know there has got to be a way to do this otherwise code reuse and DLL sharing seems useless, so any help you can suggest would be appreciated.
Here is are additional efforts that I have made and in response to some of the post so far.
Also here is what I have experienced with the GAC so far.
- on a computer with VS2010 installed, the gacutil is located in C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDK... and from forum on questions "Where is the gacutil" the general tone is that gacutil is now considered a dev tool and not intended for use in prod environments. Gacutil is not part of the Server 2008 or .Net 4 framework, so there are several suggestions on how to deploy and deal with GAC dlls
first, the old way of installing, using the gacutil, but by using psexec to copy and call gacutil on the production server. I can get psexec to run the gacutil from a local dev box to a prod server and get a return code of 0, success, however I cannot find a way to actually view that it is installed on the production server, because there is not gacutil on prod server, I can't use someting like gacutil /l DataEntity.dll to view info on installed dll...if it even installed correctly.
I tried copying the gacutil.exe and gacutil.exe.config files to production server to try and run from there. While the program run and gives the version number of the gacutil, it doesn't respond to any command line switches such as gacutil.exe /i DataEntity.dll or gacutil.exe /l DataEntity. It just displays the gacutil version info again and stops.
Someone suggesed on a forum to installing the Microsoft SDK on the prod machine. While I might have to consider this due to lack of success so far, I really don't like the idea of installing an SDK on my production evironments.
I tried to find tools such as the Remote GAC Manager to view and manage, but the last development on that opensource project was 2008, so when I try to use it to veiw the GAC, it is wanting to show me c:\Windows\assembly gac dlls, but .NET 4 now uses C:\windows\Microsoft.NET\assembly to store GAC dlls, so I can's seem to find any way to view or maintain DLLs on the remote production server's gac. If I run a dir DataEntity.dll /s command at c:\windows in the command prompt, I find the dll embedded in the C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\assembly\GAC_MSIL directory, but if I try to look at the file through explorer in C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\assembly\GAC_MSIL, I cannot see the dll, so I cannot find a tool that allows me to manage (install, list, uninstall) the DLLs in C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\assembly\GAC_MSIL on the server 2008 production server.
There was a suggestion to install dlls into gac via drag and drop. I am trying to automate our deployment process, so having to manually drag and drop doesn't make a lot of sense. Does a copy to the C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\assembly\GAC_MSIL directory work too? I've tried it, but again since I cannot find a tool that will let me see the installed/registered DLLs I can't tell if it worked or not.
another suggestion was to create an installer that would just install into the GAC. I tried this method and ran into a couple of issues. First it was a very manual process. I could not figure out how to get it to uninstall the old dll from GAC and then install the new version of DLL in gac; it kept insisting that I uninstall the previous installation first. Second, when I tried to uninstall the dll, it kept saying that it was in use by another application. I tried restarting and then uninstalling it, but no go. I finally figured out it was IIS and had to shutdown IIS, uninstall, restart, install, and then restart IIS. This is a pain in the but to try and automate.
Seems like there should be a better way to deploy dlls to a production environment into a shared directory. I simply want to try and put the DataEntity.dll in a c:\MyLibraries directory and have the processes access that one copy of the DLL. Microsoft does it with the C:\Program Files\Common Files, so it should be possible, but I have now spent days trying to find a way that works that would considerabley reduce the maintenance efforts imposed by the GAC or installer options, reduce the number of duplicate dlls, and avoiding overlooking replacing dlls if allowed to 'copy locally'.
the best solution for your problem is using Web Services.web services are created for this purpose.You can build a WCF service library and then use it's methods in all of your projects.
Good Luck
The GAC approach is probably the closest one to what you are looking for. Since you were unable to get the GAC working, you should double check to makes sure you followed the instructions for installing in the GAC.
This may seem pretty "out-there" as a solution but we are considering using a Git Repository to do a remote publish to multiple servers, the Git repository would be committed with the latest DLL(and only the DLL), then pushed to each production server/application server.
Related
So I have an web app that need the Oracle 19c client (4.122.19.1) due to certain syntax changes, while our Dev IIS server has an older 4.121.2.0 client.
Anyway, I put all of what I've heard to be the proper support dlls in the Bin directory of the app, which from all my research are these:
oci.dll
ociw32.dll
Oracle.ManagedDataAccess.dll
Oracle.Web.dll
orannzsbb19.dll
oraocci19.dll
oraocci19d.dll
oraociei19.dll
oraons.dll
OraOps19.dll
This runs perfectly from my PC in Visual Studio. When I deploy to a Dev IIS server (with app-pool running in Enable 32-bit because my PC runs IISExpress in 32-bit) There are various Oracle connection errors.
Now, in Process Explorer, on my PC, I look at the IISExpress and I can see it's loaded all of the above dlls, though from the GAC because I have this client installed locally. Yet on the Dev server, Process Explorer, under my W3WP.exe process, I see only the Oracle.ManagedDataAccess.dll and Oracle.Web.dll, but none of the support DLLS. I'm fairly certain the fact that these are missing, especially OraOps19.dll, is the issue.
I've used the "DLLPath" thing in the web.config, it makes no difference. I was always told that Asp.Net always trys to load from the BIN first. Yet here I believe it is at least partially ignoring it--both in my PC, which is going straight to the GAC, and from the Dev IIS server, which does get the proper .Web and .ManagedDataAccess from Bin, but nothing else.
How can I make this forget the Gac and force it to find anything it needs Oracle-wise in the Bin?
Thanks
The dlls are bugged; it's not allowed to release breaking changes to signed dlls like that. Workaround:
Assuming these are 100% il code (no C++/clr involved)
ildasm the oracle dlls to .il and .res files
Remove all references to the public key
ilasm the .il and .res files back to dlls
link your application against those dlls
Now it doesn't look in the GAC anymore.
We have a C# .NET website which was developed and maintained by a third party. I'm due to take over the general upkeep soon, so am trying to get a system going where I can maintain a local copy and deploy updates to the website. We need to make it work for two of us to work on for at least another month, after that I'm on my own.
We have an SVN of source, and an SVN of production published code. I can pull the solution and after some faffing I can make it build and run without problems locally. I'm using Visual Studio 2015, the target framework is 4.0.
I can update cshtml files, build, publish locally, and then copy these files over the website published version and it runs fine.
However, the bin/dlls that are produced, if copied into the website version, produces this fabulous error:
http://website.com/Error/InternalServerError?aspxerrorpath=/
Server Error in '/' Application. Runtime Error.
Description: An exception occurred while processing your request.
Additionally, another exception occurred while executing the custom error page for the first exception.
The request has been terminated.
If I copy back the dlls from the original, it works fine.
If I don't modify the code, but just build and publish the project, my dlls are still different sizes from the website versions.
The developers are using Visual Studio 2012, is this a factor? Why are the dlls for my local version (that runs fine) different, if I download the source and build/publish it with no changes?
The dlls in question by the way are a single one for the website itself, website.dll say, and one for 'objects' that they've dumped a load of functions into for doing various things, objects.dll, these are the only two I'm trying to copy over - all the other dlls match in size between my and the website versions.
I'm pretty new to this so may be making some fundamental mistakes here, but if I am, then our developer isn't picking up on them. I mean, I'm kind of not surprised that they're different, surely you need to deploy the whole project, and not just drop some dlls into an existing published folder? My developer is saying that's the only way we can do it...
Any tips of things I can try?
Thanks in advance.
Well, after a LOT of trial and error, I finally found a solution that works for me, for the moment:
Using nuget package manager, I reverted to Microsoft.AspNet.Mvc version 4.0.40804 for the project in question. This seems to have updated all the references and runtimes back to the 4.0.0.0 that the project was built using.
When I build, publish, and copy across the main dlls, the site now runs, rather than showing the 'Server Error in '/' Application. Runtime Error'
One thing, are there security implications for running such an old version? Maybe that needs to be a new question...
Thanks for all the help.
My application needs an Oracle .dll which I deploy into the bin folder of the application along with the rest, and it works fine.
But what I want to do is to avoid deploying the library, so I need the server to know where to look for it. I added the .dll into C:\Oracle\bin, a path which is included at Path system variable. But it can't find the assembly if it's not into the application's bin folder.
Any hints, please?
This is pretty much have things work. You have discovered 2 viable deployment options. 1) Bundle it in your applications bin directory or 2) Install the oracle network protocol correctly and using the install API.
There are really only 2 more options that I can think of. 1) Statically link with the necessary network libraries -- I don't recall ever seeing these available on Windows, I know I have used static linking to OCI libraries on Unix, been a long time ago though. 2) Host the Oracle connectivity in a middle tier and have you deployed application always make calls to your middle tier (instead of direct Oracle calls)
BTW, you probably do not want to use the OCI libraries, ugly code compared to the modern ways of doing it.
If you go into the reference properties for the dll that you are trying to add you can change the Copy Local property to False.
This will allow for the program to pull the dll from the original location that you found the dll in.
The only thing that you have to watch out for is that your dll is in the same location on your dev PC as it is on your Server if it isn't your program will not find your dll. an example of this is if the dll on your server is in C:\Oracle\bin it must be at C:\Oracle\bin on your dev PC.
I am helping out with a project that a contractor worked on previously (so I don't have a lot of history for it).
The project builds fine, but when we try to perform some operations, we get a runtime error indicating that System.Management.Automation.dll could not be found.
As a troublshooting measure, we manually installed the dll into the installation directory. We then get an error indicating failure to load Microsoft.Management.Infrastructure.
As nearly as I can tell, these dlls are present in the Microsoft Management Framework download, and possibly in Powershell 3.0.
My question: What is the smallest package that these dlls are a part of, and what is the best way to deploy them for a production software release?
Edit
Just to be clear -- I am not looking to hack/frankenbuild by deploying just those dlls "naked", I am trying to identify the correct redistributable package for those dlls. I just can't seem to work out which one it is.
Edit
If it helps, the nature of the code that we are running is to programmatically create an exchange mailbox.
I think you can't legally redistribute any of those two DLLs alone (discussed for example here for the Automation, you can also check the "Redistributable" section on MSDN for those namespaces). You will have to make sure the target machines have PowerShell and the Management Framework.
Just in case anyone else runs into this problem: We ended up resolving the issue by deploying the Windows Management Framework 3.0, which includes the necessary assemblies. http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=34595
How can I deploy a C# Visual Studio 2005 project so that I can run the application in another system? My project has a few dependencies and files that have to be integrated while deploying the project.
What is the best way to handle this?
You need to know what dependencies you have.
you need to have .Net framework installed
you have to explicitly install all dependencies that you used from the GAC on your target machine (some 3rd party components)
and then you just need to copy files from your \bin\Release folder
install all services, etc. if you have any
In the simplest cases only copying files should be enough.
Have you looked into ClickOnce deployment?
It's far from perfect, but for projects without a huge amount of overhead, it's generally good enough.
What kind of project?
Assuming it's a regular winforms application, just copy everything from either the obj\debug or obj\release directory to the new computer. Then run your executable
You can right click on the project file in visual studio and publish to a different location. This will build the site and copy it to the specified directory.
Also, if you need to do anything extra during the build, you can specify custom build actions on the build tab of the project's properties.
EDIT: now that I see you added that it's a windows application my answer doesn't matter. I'd try adding a setup and deployment project in visual studio to handle installing/deploying your windows application.
You more or less have three options (maybe 4?) as I see it.
Windows Installer
ClickOnce
Just distribute
the exe itself
In your particular case I would suggest ClickOnce as long as the project is not massive with too many dependencies.
For other alternatives.
The right answer depends on many criteria.
The simplest way to deploy is by copying files. Just put your .exe, the dependent .dll's, and the .config file in a directory and copy it onto the target machine. It's simple, but there are many restrictions to this approach:
It assumes that the target machine has the right version of the .NET framework installed
It assumes a certain technical competence on the part of the person installing the software.
The installation won't do basic things like create start menu items.
Publishing the program for ClickOnce deployment addresses a lot of these issues, but it's got its own set of limitations. I haven't used it much, so there are probably more than these, though these alone are pretty significant:
Programs are installed into the ClickOnce cache, not the Program Files directory.
If your program does anything outside of the ClickOnce sandbox, you have to deal with security elevation and code signing.
You can create a VS Setup and Deployment project and build an .msi file to install the program. The most obvious drawback to this is that it's complicated: .msi files can do many, many things, and the Setup and Deployment object model is complex, with documentation that is, let us say, fanciful. But there are things you can do with .msi installation that you can't readily do with other approaches, including (and certainly not limited to):
Cleanly uninstall the program through Add/Remove Programs.
Provide an actual UI for installation that lets the user decide where to put the program.
Support scripted installation via MSIEXEC.
Install components besides the program, e.g. databases, COM objects, etc.
Put components in the target machine's GAC.