Summary

This chapter began to look at the larger picture ”namely, building applications for distribution. It discussed the concept of .NET assemblies, including what they are and how to use them. You can use private assemblies when you do not need to share your code among different applications. The process of building and installing a private assembly is simple: Just copy the files along with the application. If you do need to share your code among many applications, you can create a public assembly and store it in the global assembly cache. The GAC provides storage and management of all public assemblies, preventing naming or version conflicts in a reliable and predictable manner.

A combination of several techniques is often best for solving the problem of assembly management. The GAC provides a well-known location into which you can load shared executables. It also provides a form of symbolic naming, wherein subdirectories, which are identified by version information, contain the different versions of the executable. The CLR takes care of resolving version information, without forcing users to create their own symbolic names to avoid version conflicts. Finally, the use of local private assemblies provides a means of resolving assembly lookup locally with resorting to the GAC.