Summary

In this chapter, you learned about two core concepts within the .NET Framework: the assembly and the AppDomain. The assembly is the most basic logical unit of deployment in the framework. It contains a manifest that stores metadata about the assembly and its dependencies, as well as information about resources and types contained within the assembly. In addition, the assembly contains compiled MSIL code. Lastly, you learned about the AppDomain, the core logical unit of execution within the framework. All code runs within an AppDomain. By being aware of the AppDomain's presence, you can create code that exerts tight control over which assemblies are loaded and unloaded and how they are executed.

The combined knowledge of how both assemblies and AppDomains work as well as interoperate will give you a tremendous advantage as you move forward to learn about more complex aspects of the .NET Framework and C# 2.0.