Summary

Assemblies are the new installation unit for the .NET platform. Microsoft learned from problems with previous architectures and did a complete redesign to avoid the old problems. This chapter discussed the features of assemblies: they are self-describing and no type library and registry information is needed. Version dependencies are exactly recorded so that with assemblies, the DLL Hell we had with old DLLs no longer exists. Because of these features, not only development but also deployment and administration have become a lot easier.

The chapter also discussed cross-language support, and you created a C# class that derives from a Visual Basic class that makes use of a C++/CLI class and looked at the differences in the generated MSIL code.

You learned the differences between private and shared assemblies and saw how shared assemblies can be created. With private assemblies, you don't have to pay attention to uniqueness and versioning issues because these assemblies are copied and only used by a single application. Sharing assemblies has the requirement to use a key for uniqueness, and to define the version. You looked at the global assembly cache that can be used as an intelligent store for shared assemblies.

You looked at overriding versioning issues to use a version of an assembly different from the one that was used during development; this is done through publisher policies and application configuration files. Finally, you learned how probing works with private assemblies.