Skip to Content
Professional C# 2005
book

Professional C# 2005

by Christian Nagel, Bill Evjen, Jay Glynn, Karli Watson, Morgan Skinner, Allen Jones
November 2005
Intermediate to advanced
1586 pages
43h 15m
English
Wrox
Content preview from Professional C# 2005

Chapter 15. Assemblies

An assembly is the .NET term for a deployment and configuration unit. This chapter discusses exactly what assemblies are, how they can be applied, and why they are such a useful feature. In particular, this chapter covers the following topics:

  • The innovations offered by assemblies over previous technologies

  • How to create and view assemblies

  • What the Common Language Specification means, and how cross-language support is made possible

  • How to share assemblies

The chapter begins with an overview of assemblies.

What Are Assemblies?

Before the .NET platform was introduced, you had to deal with the predecessors of assemblies: normal DLLs exporting global functions and COM DLLs exporting COM classes. Microsoft itself introduced the phrase "DLL Hell" to describe traditional problems with DLLs—problems known all too well.

Often applications break because a newly installed application overwrites a DLL that has also been used by another application. Sometimes the installation replaces a new DLL with an old one, because the installation program does not correctly check the versions or the versions are not correctly set. More often, an old DLL is replaced by a new version. Normally, this shouldn't be a problem—the new DLL should be backward-compatible with the old version; however, often that is not the case.

Windows 2000 introduced the side-by-side feature, which allows the installation of DLLs in the application's directory. With side-by-side, you can install a different version ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.

Read now

Unlock full access

More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly

AirBnbBlueOriginElectronic ArtsHomeDepotNasdaqRakutenTata Consultancy Services

QuotationMarkO’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
Julian F.
Head of Cybersecurity
QuotationMarkI wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
Addison B.
Field Engineer
QuotationMarkI’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
Amir M.
Data Platform Tech Lead
QuotationMarkI'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Mark W.
Embedded Software Engineer

You might also like

Professional C# 2008

Professional C# 2008

Christian Nagel, Bill Evjen, Jay Glynn, Morgan Skinner, Karli Watson
Beginning Visual C#® 2005

Beginning Visual C#® 2005

Karli Watson, Christian Nagel, Jacob Hammer Pedersen, Jon D. Reid, Morgan Skinner, Eric White

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780764575341Purchase book