Deploying .net DLLs for use by ColdFusion?

My company currently runs a .net/sharepoint intranet and a ColdFusio开发者_运维知识库n public website. There is a lot of duplicated functionality and clumsy web service layers used to support the two platforms. Recently we have been exploring using .net classes in our ColdFusion front end which has shown a lot of promise.

There are a few issues related to managing the DLLs though. We are currently just loading the DLL from a directory on the server but it seems that once ColdFusion loads the DLL you can now longer overwrite the DLL without first stopping the Coldfusion .Net service. I noticed that ColdFusion also supports loading classes from the GAC.

For anyone who has gone down this route - how so you manage the DLLs that ColdFusion uses, specifically updating and deploying the DLLs? Should we use the assembly cache? Are there any other gotchas?

I would strongly suggest GAC if possible, as long as you're developing the libraries yourself (which you are, thus the need to update them) so you can enforce strongly named assemblies and their dependencies etc.

If you're in control some of the drawbacks of GAC become positives, like the assembly running as it does with the compiled framework rather than the installed one. Removes the chance (even though its unlikely) that a .net framework upgrade is going to adversely affect your code.

Using the GAC is considered best practice to avoid DLL Hell (dependency hell).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DLL_hell

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