Yes, MS decided to make the developer’s life harder, but some of us didn’t notice for 2 more years. :(
UPDATE:
Depending on how hard your server is locked down, this may not work.
I wrote a script to register several components, and report on any exceptions. There were no exceptions, and the server’s exception logs didn’t register any exceptions, but nothing still got registered. My “echo”s did get sent back, so I know that the script executed all the way through. I had to hop through additional hurdles for that on security.
Bottom line, I tossed in the towel, and just copied all of the DLLs to the local bin directory of the executable, then manually registered the application as a windows service. Finally activated the service, and bing! It worked.
At the rate that MS is locking everything down, it is a good thing that MS is moving .NET to open source. I will be able to move my app’s front end and service end to Linux, and not have to deal with this any more.