What Is A Assembly?

What Is A Assembly

1. Assembly is a unit of deployment like EXE or a DLL.

2. An Assembly consists of one or more files(dlls,exe's) and represents a group of resources,

type definition, and implementation of those types. An assembly may also contain references
to other assemblies. These resources, types and references are described in a block of data
called a manifest.

3. An assembly is a 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.

4. 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.

Different types of Assemblies

There are two types of assemby Private and Public assembly. A private assembly is normally
used by a single application, and is stored in the application's directory, or a sub-directory 
beneath. A shared assembly is normally stored in the global assembly cache, which is a
repository of assemblies maintained ny the .NET runtime. Shared assemblies are usually
libraries of code which many applications will find useful, e.g. Crystal report classes which 
will be used by all application for Reports