I've installed the full version of .NET Framework 4 (Client Profile + Extended) on a customer machine which is running Windows Small Business Server 2003 Standard Edition. The installation was successful without any errors. There were no errors mentioned in the log files either...
BUT the .NET Framework 4 GAC (Global Assembly Cache) is completely missing! In other words, the following folder is missing:-
C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\assembly
If I look into the C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET folder, I can only see 2 subfolders (as shown below) and nothing else.
authman
Framework
The server still has .NET Framework 3.5 installed and is running properly. This means that the GAC folder below exists and has all .NET library DLLs in it. But of course, there are no .NET 4 DLLs in there.
C:\Windows\assembly
Because of the missing .NET Framework 4 GAC, none of my applications run. They all complain about missing System or System.Xml references. If I copy the missing files from the C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319 folder to my application directory, they will stop complaining about these files and start complaining about other missing .NET files. Obviously I use a lot of .NET Library references, and I don't want to copy the whole .NET Framework folder into each of my applications.
Does anyone know how to create the missing GAC? Or at least find out what causes the GAC to disappear? I tried multiple times to re-install the .NET Framework 4, but the GAC is always missing...
Edit: I've also tried running gacutil.exe -l to see what is in the GAC, it only list out .NET assemblies of version 1.0 to 3.5. All .NET 4 assemblies are missing.
Note: .NET 4 version of gacutil.exe only comes with Visual Studio (or Windows SDK), so I have to copy the file to the customer site.