Assemblies
Now that you have seen the overall picture of software development, you can better understand the structure of a Visual Studio .NET application. In all .NET languages the application is represented by an assembly. An assembly is a collection of all software of which the application consists. It is called the unit of deployment for a .NET application. That means that you need an assembly to install an application. This assembly is normally an executable file (.exe) or a dynamic link library file (.dll). Each assembly contains an assembly manifest, which is similar to a table of contents for the assembly. It contains information about the assembly (name, version, and so on), a list of files that are in this assembly, and a list of
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