The assembly boundary also forms a type accessibility boundary: the C# internal accessibility modifier allows types to restrict method accessibility to a single assembly. Additionally, references to types are always scoped by the assembly in which the type resides ”the unique reference for a type (known as a TypeRef ) is the combination of a reference to the assembly it was defined in and the fully qualified type name including any namespaces. For example, this local variable declaration: System.Net.WebRequest wr; is represented in MSIL as follows : .assembly extern System.Net { .ver 1:0:2914:16 ... } .locals(class [System.Net]System.Net.WebRequest wr) As you can see from this example, in order to reference a type unambiguously, we need to be able to identify the assembly that contains it unambiguously. The .NET Framework's mechanism for naming assemblies is very powerful, and is a giant step beyond the use of ProgIDs and GUIDs in classic COM development. |