How to prevent a .NET application from loading/referencing an assembly from the GAC?

To successfully deploy your .NET Framework application, you must understand how the common language runtime locates and binds to the assemblies that make up your application. By default, the runtime attempts to bind with the exact version of an assembly that the application was built with. This default behavior can be overridden by configuration file settings.

You can view binding information in the log file using the Assembly Binding Log Viewer (Fuslogvw.exe), which is included in the Windows Software Development Kit (SDK).