Application Development Using Visual Basic and .NET By Robert J. Oberg, Peter Thorsteinson, Dana L. Wyatt
Table of Contents
Part 4. Fundamentals of the .NET Framework
Deployment makes the programmer's hard work available to the customer. .NET assemblies make deployment much simpler and much more reliable than traditional Windows deployment. Private assembly deployment is as simple as copying the component assembly into the same directory as the client program. Alternatively, shared assembly deployment places the component with a unique name (known as a strong name ) in the Global Assembly Cache (GAC), making it available for general use.
This chapter begins with a discussion of components and how to work with them in .NET. We then cover assemblies, which are the fundamental unit of deployment in .NET. Private assembly deployment and shared assembly deployment are described next . Versioning and digital signing of assemblies are discussed in the context of shared deployment. Finally, the Visual Studio .NET deployment and setup wizards are introduced. Throughout our discussion we illustrate a number of useful tools that are part of the .NET Framework SDK.
