Why Can’t I Copy Assemblies from the GAC?

Today, I needed to obtain a copy of an assembly referenced in a web.config of one of our applications. The assembly referenced resembled the following:

<assemblies>
  <add assembly="Oracle.DataAccess, Version=10.1.0.200, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=89B483F429C47342"/>
</assemblies>

I tried making a copy of an assembly from the GAC to my file system. Simple task, right? That’s what I thought until I right-clicked on a file only to find a few options, none of which had “copy”.

After googling around, I discovered that I had a few options. I opted to copy from the command line:

By going into the GAC assembly directory from the command line and drilling deeper into the directory tree, you will eventually find the DLL you’re looking for.