Versioning Assemblies
The first section in this chapter discussed DLL versioning problems that have long perplexed Windows developers. When you are versioning a standard Windows DLL or a COM DLL, backward compatibility is critical, because installing a new version of a DLL on a target machine effectively overwrites any earlier versions. When you author a new version of a DLL that fails to meet all the requirements of backward compatibility, bad things often happen. When older applications are forced to use a newer, incompatible version of a DLL, they either break or start behaving in a strange and mysterious fashion.
The .NET Framework greatly improves this situation, because backward compatibility between versions of an assembly DLL is not so ...
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