Assemblies are the building blocks of .NET Framework applications; they form the fundamental unit of deployment, version control, reuse, activation scoping, and security permissions. An assembly is a collection of types and resources that are built to work together and form a logical unit of functionality. An assembly provides the CLR with the information it needs to be aware of type implementations. To the runtime, a type does not exist outside the context of an assembly. The simplest way to look at an assembly is that it is either a .NET (managed) DLL or an EXE. Sometimes, it can be a file that contains a group of DLLs, but that's rare. Now that we have discussed some basic building blocks of the .NET Framework, let's move on to discuss some things you need to do when building managed code. |