[Mono-dev] Customizing Mono for a specific app

[Thiago Padilha]

  Hi

  I want to distribute a portable ASP.NET application with its own
managed web server - aspNETserve, however this server only seems to
work when its assemblies are installed in the GAC, otherwise the '
ApplicationManager.CreateObject' throws a FileNotFoundException for
failing to find the core aspNETserve assembly. This method creates a
new appdomain for hosting the server, but there seems to be no way of
specifiying the base directory for it(where it should look for
assemblies).  I think this could be solved if I distributed a private
runtime along with the app, and specified a subfolder on the App as
the GAC for that private runtime.

  This poses a problem because I don't want to ship the full mono
class library along with the app, just the necessary assemblies, so I
need three things:

  1-Build the mono runtime (only the necessary to start it from an
unmanaged host)
  2-Write a host that dynamically links and starts the private mono runtime
  3-Have this custom mono runtime use the private GAC for resolving assemblies

  My question is how to perform step 3 : Is that done at build time or
at runtime when I start mono from my custom host?

  Thanks in advance.