I needed to add a System class to my config file, and found it would not work unless given a fully qualified assembly name. Ok, no worries, I'll simply look that up.
Uh oh.
I expected the Object Browser in Visual Studio to have that information. That would be too obvious. It was not there. I started to search for how to get this information, and found MSDN for .net 4 telling me to use Mscorcfg.msc, except MSDN also says that Mscorcfg.msc "has been removed from .NET 4 and later versions." This is not an auspicious beginning.
Of course there are answers that explain how to do it programmatically; I already know how to do that, and that isn't the point. I don't want to write my own program just to find the publickeytoken of an assembly I want to put into my config file.
I then find an article suggesting "sn.exe" for files not in the GAC, and an answer suggesting the gacutil for everything else. A few others suggest using RedGate's Reflector. Sigh.
I'm trying to figure out why such a common activity - inserting a fully qualified assembly name into a config file - requires such a "Visual Studio 6 era" hokey-pokey firedrill to get such a simple thing done. So we come full circle: Why on EARTH does the object browser not simply provide this information? Please tell me there is a simple VS configuration option I've missed, that explains how this is done.
To be clear, yes, I have obtained the FQAN I was seeking. I just don't think resorting to GACUTIL.exe, after googling for a while in disbelief, should be the right answer. What am I missing?
