All About Assemblies
The best way to describe an assembly is that it's the fundamental unit of deployable code in the .NET Framework. That may sound awkward, but it's still the best way to describe assemblies. The .EXE and .DLL files you create are assemblies, and each assembly is a collection of files held internally and appearing to the users to be a single file. The term assembly was introduced because you can produce deployable code in both EXE and DLL format, and the term assembly covers them both.
Assemblies were also designed to alleviate “DLL Hell,” which occurs when a new application loads a new version of a DLL file, overwriting the previous version. Such an action can break earlier applications that relied on the original DLL. Because ...
Get Microsoft® Visual C#® .NET 2003 Kick Start now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
