Summary

 

Chapter 8 - Assemblies
bySimon Robinsonet al.
Wrox Press 2002

  

Assemblies are the new installation unit for the .NET platform. Microsoft learned from problems with previous architectures and did a complete redesign to avoid the old problems. In this chapter, we discussed the features of assemblies: they are self-describing and no type library and registry information is needed. Version dependencies are exactly recorded so that with assemblies, the DLL Hell we had with old DLLs is no more. Because of these features, not only development but also deployment and administration become a lot easier.

We discussed cross-language support and created a C# class that derives from a VB.NET class that makes use of a managed C++ class, and looked at the differences in the generated MSIL code.

We explored the use of resources and how this helps with localization of applications. We created satellite assemblies manually and with the built-in help of Visual Studio .NET. Besides using resources for localization we also looked at how to implement date and number formatting that is dependent on the language of the user .

We discussed the differences between private and shared assemblies, and how shared assemblies can be created. With private assemblies we don't have to pay attention to uniquness and versioning issues as these assemblies are copied and only used by a single application. Sharing assemblies has the requirement to use a key for uniquness, and to define the version. We looked at the global assembly cache that can be used as an intelligent store for shared assemblies.

We looked at overriding versioning issues to use a version of an assembly different from the one that was used during development; this is done through publisher policies and application configuration files. We also discussed how probing works with private assemblies, and finally, we considered the deployment of assemblies.