ASP.NET in a Nutshell

Deploying Assemblies

Assemblies are the basic unit of deployment for managed applications, including ASP.NET applications. Assemblies are used in ASP.NET in several ways, each of which has different implications for deployment. The three categories of assembly are described below. The steps required to deploy application-specific and global assemblies appear in subsequent sections.

Automatically generated assemblies

Includes assemblies that are dynamically generated by the ASP.NET runtime for each .aspx page in your application, as well as for code-behind files identified by the src attribute of the @ Page directive. Because these assemblies are generated at runtime automatically, no action is required on the part of the developer at deployment time.

Application-specific assemblies

Includes assemblies resulting from the compilation of code-behind files, whether through building an application in Visual Studio .NET or using the command-line compilers. This category also includes compiled assemblies containing business logic code, and/or assemblies containing custom server controls. All application-specific assemblies should reside in the application’s bin subdirectory (also known as the local assembly cache), which allows your application to locate and use the assembly’s members. There they are automatically loaded into memory by the ASP.NET runtime. Because these assemblies reside within the folder tree of the application, when you deploy the application using XCOPY, FTP, or Windows ...