Understanding Assemblies
The way versioning is handled in the .NET world is considerably different than the way things were done with COM. In the past, each component (DLL or EXE, for example) had an embedded version number and was registered in the Windows registry using a unique ID. Whenever a new version of the component was distributed to a computer and registered, the registry would be updated and all clients that made use of the component on that computer would use the new component. This lead to a phenomenon known as “DLL Hell,” which essentially consisted of the following problems:
Some installation applications were poorly written and would actually install an older component file over a newer version. This would break applications ...
Get Practical Standards for Microsoft® Visual Basic® .NET, Second Edition 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.
