Application Development Using Visual Basic and .NET By Robert J. Oberg, Peter Thorsteinson, Dana L. Wyatt
Table of Contents
Chapter 9. Assemblies and Deployment
Deployment is very important, and it constitutes one of the major phases in software development. If it is not done properly, the entire development effort becomes a waste of time and money. Fortunately, with assemblies, which are the fundamental units of .NET deployment, many of the complexities and problems relating to deployment are conveniently solved .
By simply building dynamic link libraries, you can have reusable components without all the difficulties associated with building and installing COM components .
Private assembly deployment can be simply copying the assembly to the same directory as the client application. Public assembly deployment involves the creation of a strong name for the assembly, followed by deployment into the global assembly cache. The Strong Name Utility ( Sn.exe ) can be used to create the strong name for an assembly. The Global Assembly Cache utility Gacutil.exe or the .NET Admin Tool can then be used to deploy the shared assembly into the GAC. It is also possible to combine multiple modules into a single logical assembly. To do this, you build separate modules that lack manifest information, and then a manifest module can be generated for the entire set of modules that comprise the assembly. The Visual Studio .NET CAB and setup wizards are very useful for creating starter setup and deployment projects, which can save a great deal of development time.
