What is a .Net Assembly?
The .NET assembly is the standard for components developed with the Microsoft.NET. Dot NET assemblies may or may not be executable, i.e., they might exist as the executable (.exe) file or dynamic link library (DLL) file. All the .NET assemblies contain the definition of types, versioning information for the type, meta-data, and manifest. The designers of .NET have worked a lot on the component (assembly) resolution.
The .NET assembly is the standard for components developed with the Microsoft.NET. Dot NET assemblies may or may not be executable, i.e., they might exist as the executable (.exe) file or dynamic link library (DLL) file. All the .NET assemblies contain the definition of types, versioning information for the type, meta-data, and manifest. The designers of .NET have worked a lot on the component (assembly) resolution.
There are two kind of assemblies in .NET;
- private
- shared
Private assemblies are simple and copied with each calling assemblies in the calling assemblies folder.
Shared assemblies
(also called strong named assemblies) are copied to a single location
(usually the Global assembly cache). For all calling assemblies within
the same application, the same copy of the shared assembly is used from
its original location. Hence, shared assemblies are not copied in the
private folders of each calling assembly. Each shared assembly has a
four part name including its face name, version, public key token and
culture information. The public key token and version information makes
it almost impossible for two different assemblies with the same name or
for two similar assemblies with different version to mix with each
other.
An
assembly can be a single file or it may consist of the multiple files.
In case of multi-file, there is one master module containing the
manifest while other assemblies exist as non-manifest modules. A module
in .NET is a sub part of a multi-file .NET assembly. Assembly is one of
the most interesting and extremely useful areas of .NET architecture
along with reflections and attributes, but unfortunately very few people
take interest in learning such theoretical looking topics.
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