How do you deploy your common SharePoint library

Question

We have a class library where we keep a lot of the stuff that we often use when doing sharepoint development. How would you go around deploying this? Right now our best bet is to have it in a separate solution, and deploy that so that the assembly is deployed to GAC. That way we ensure that the assembly is deployed to all application tiers and is available.

Is there a better approach than this?

Answer 1

GAC, of course, is the easiest way to deploy an assembly; however, what if you don't want to share this assembly across an entire server. Or what if the license doesn't permit that.

So, there are two ways to deploy an assembly:

1. GAC (you already know about it)

2. BIN folder. To deploy your assembly to the bin folder of your site (e.g. C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\80) you'll need to create a custom Security Policy file and change a security level in the web.config. This is not easy at all and can be quite frustrating but may be well worth it.

More information: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc768621.aspx