April 2003
Intermediate to advanced
560 pages
14h 4m
English
Content preview from Programming Visual Basic .NET, Second EditionBecome 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,
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Shared Assemblies
You can create assemblies that can be shared by other applications. You might want to do this if you have written a generic control or a class that might be used by other developers. If you want to share your assembly, it must meet certain stringent requirements.
First, your assembly must have a strong name. Strong names are globally unique.
Tip
No one else can generate the same strong name as you because an assembly generated with one private key is guaranteed to have a different name than any assembly generated with another private key.
Second, your shared assembly must be protected against newer versions trampling over it, and so it must have version control.
Finally, to share your assembly, place it in the Global Assembly Cache (GAC) (pronounced GACK). This is an area of the filesystem set aside by the Common Language Runtime (CLR) to hold shared assemblies.
The End of DLL Hell
Assemblies mark the end of DLL Hell. Remember this scenario: You install Application A on your machine, and it loads a number of DLLs into your Windows directory. It works great for months. You then install Application B on your machine, and suddenly, unexpectedly, Application A breaks. Application B is in no way related to Application A. So what happened? It turns out, you later learn, that Application B replaced a DLL that Application A needed, and suddenly Application A begins to stagger about, blind and senseless.
When DLLs were invented, disk space was at a premium and reusing ...
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O’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.
I 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.
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I'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.