.Net publisher policy -- original publisher policy file?
I am in the course of checking whether we should create a publisher policy file for our solution. To this end I studied the [MSDN documentation][1] for the topic.  I'm confused by the last sentence on that page (note that I'm referring to the .Net 3.5 version, that sentence may not be present in the documentation of other versions): 

    Important Note:

    The publisher policy assembly cannot be added to the global assembly cache unless the original publisher policy file is located in the same directory as the assembly. 

i) what is meant by 'the original publisher policy file'? The scenario we are dealing with is that we shipped a version of our solution to the customer (without a publisher policy by now). The customer may have created assemblies on his own which are referring to some of our strongly named assemblies. Now a new version (upate) of our solution is to be shipped, which should not break the customer assemblies. My understanding is that a publisher policy allows for just that, but we would (could) ship it only with the update. Is that a problem?

ii) which assembly does the last word in that sentence refer to? The assembly containing the publisher policy, or the assembly for which the publisher policy defines the binding redirection?

iii) the documentation says that the publisher policy has to be added to the GAC, but it does not say anything about the strongly named assemblies affected by the publisher policy. Right now, for our solution, these are deployed into the application directory and we want to keep it that way. My understandig of the concept is that this is possible. Could somebody confirm this?

Tia,

Thomas

  [1]: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dz32563a%28v=vs.90%29.aspx
.Net publisher policy -- original publisher policy file?
===

I am in the course of checking whether we should create a publisher policy file for our solution. To this end I studied the [MSDN documentation][1] for the topic.  I'm confused by the last sentence on that page (note that I'm referring to the .Net 3.5 version, that sentence may not be present in the documentation of other versions): 

    Important Note:

    The publisher policy assembly cannot be added to the global assembly cache unless the original publisher policy file is located in the same directory as the assembly. 

i) what is meant by 'the original publisher policy file'? The scenario we are dealing with is that we shipped a version of our solution to the customer (without a publisher policy by now). The customer may have created assemblies on his own which are referring to some of our strongly named assemblies. Now a new version (upate) of our solution is to be shipped, which should not break the customer assemblies. My understanding is that a publisher policy allows for just that, but we would (could) ship it only with the update. Is that a problem?

ii) which assembly does the last word in that sentence refer to? The assembly containing the publisher policy, or the assembly for which the publisher policy defines the binding redirection?

iii) the documentation says that the publisher policy has to be added to the GAC, but it does not say anything about the strongly named assemblies affected by the publisher policy. Right now, for our solution, these are deployed into the application directory and we want to keep it that way. My understandig of the concept is that this is possible. Could somebody confirm this?

Tia,

Thomas

  [1]: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dz32563a%28v=vs.90%29.aspx