Identifying an Assembly

The term assembly refers to DLLs and EXEs built with one of the .NET compilers (csc.exe, the C# compiler, is of course included in that category). You already know a little about how the runtime uses the assembly concept. In Chapter 5, "Class Inheritance," you learned that types have a scope ”they're either internal or public. The meaning of the scope modifiers is defined in terms of the assembly concept. If two source files are part of the same assembly, the two files can share internal types; if they're part of separate assemblies, they can't share internal types, only public types.

Certain functions (some of which you'll learn about in this chapter) will ask you to specify the assembly that you want to work with. There are two ways to identify an assembly. Assemblies can be identified with a display name or with a path string. You're going to learn about display names and path strings in the next two sections.