I'm curious about what happens behind the scenes when an assembly reference is added to a project. I've added a reference to a couple Telerik Reporting assemblies. Telerik said VS had to be restarted for this to work. This proved true because I struggled trying to get them to work before I found out VS had to be restarted. They worked after I restarted VS though.
I've used other assemblies like AJAX Control Toolkit that, if I remember correctly for this example, worked immediately without requiring restarting.
The Telerik documentation said that these assemblies are added to the Global Assembly Cache. I'm not very familiar with the GAC. Given its name though, it seems like other assemblies with references used in the past were probably also added to the GAC without me knowing.
Are all assemblies included in a project with references always added to the GAC?
Does VS always need to be restarted if an assembly is added to the GAC?