GAC: Force an assembly to un-install

Sometimes when developing assemblies that needs to reside in GAC to work (thanks Microsoft!); it can prove very difficult to uninstall an assembly from this bucket of dlls.

I today found a good tip on how to force that operation.

1. Open RegEdit
2. Go to the below location.
3. Delete the entries you wish to remove from here
4. You can now delete them from the GAC (in the file system)

Link: http://abhi.dcmembers.com/blog/2009/04/17/forcefully-delete-an-assembly-from-gac/

Regex: matching some words but not others

Man, I hate with a full heart the inventor of Regex, even though I’ll admit that it really can come in handy at times. The main thing with Regex is that “nobody” that are just somewhat sane can maintain these “cyrilic” scripts and strings that Regex ends up in. It’s just gibberish to say the least!  Some would even argue that it looks like a quote from Captain Haddock in Tintin!

So – how does this beast look?

input: “here we WE go again” (the ‘”’ is not part of the input)

Regex Expression	Result
\w Explanation: all alphanumeric chars	h e r e w e W E g o a g a i b
\b\w+\b Explanation: all alphanumeric chars that combines into a word (1 <= char count < infinity)	here we WE go again
\b\w{1,3}\b Explanation: all alphanumeric words (1 <= char count <=3)	we WE go
\b\w{4,}\b Explanation: all alphanumeric words (4 <= char count < infinity)	here again
\b\w{2}\b Explanation: all alphanumeric words (2 = char count)	we WE go
\b(?!\bwe\b)(\w{2})\b Explanation: all alphanumeric words but NOT ‘we’ (2 = char count)	go WE
\b(?!\bgo\b)(\w{2})\b Explanation: all alphanumeric words but NOT ‘go’ (2 = char count)	we WE
(?i)\b(?!\bwe\b)(\w{2})\b Explanation: all alphanumeric words but NOT ‘we’ (2 = char count). Ignore case	go
(?i)\b(?!\bwe\b)(?!\bgo\b)(\w{2})\b Explanation: all alphanumeric words but NOT ‘we’ OR ‘go’ (2 = char count). Ignore case	(nothing)

It still looks like gibberish to me!