Microsoft® .NET Kick Start

Using Assemblies

.NET assemblies are units of deployment, such as applications and shared libraries. Unlike normal Windows executables, assemblies contain both metadata and IL code. Assemblies can be reused by other applications by including an external reference (typically passed as a /r switch in a compiler and a reference to the appropriate application namespace). Typically, assemblies are statically generated by compilers. However, assemblies can also be dynamically created using the .NET Framework Reflection class library. Assemblies are represented as .NET platform executables (PEs). In addition to the standard PE headers, Microsoft has extended the PE/COFF (Common Object File Format) to include CLR information, such as the CLR header and ...