Assembly

What is an assembly?

1. An Assembly is a logical unit of code
2. Assembly is unit of deployment like EXE or a DLL
3. One assembly can contain one or more files
4. The constituent files can include any file types like image files, text files etc. along with DLLs or EXEs
5. An assembly is completely self-describing.An assembly contains metadata information, which is used by the CLR for everything from type checking and security to actually invoking the components methods. As all information is in the assembly itself, it is independent of registry. This is the basic advantage as compared to COM where the version was stored in registry.
6. When you compile your source code by default the exe/dll generated is actually an assembly Unless your code is bundled as assembly it can not be used in any other application
7. Multiple versions can be deployed side by side in different folders. These different versions can execute at the same time without interfering with each other. Assemblies can be private or shared. For private assembly deployment, the assembly is copied to the same directory as the client program that references it. No registration is needed, and no fancy installation program is required.70 When the component is removed, no registry cleanup is needed, and no uninstall program is required. Just delete it from the hard drive
8. When you talk about version of a component you are actually talking about version of the assembly to which the component belongs.
9. Every assembly file contains information about itself. This information is called as Assembly Manifest.
10. In shared assembly deployment, an assembly is installed in the Global Assembly Cache (or GAC). The GAC contains shared assemblies that are globally accessible to all .NET applications on the machine.