Assemblies: The Basic Unit of Deployment
An assembly is roughly equivalent to a DLL in the COM world: It wraps up one or more pieces of an application into a self-contained package. When we talk about deploying applications and components in .NET, we are really talking about deploying assemblies. As an example, if you compile a simple forms application, the resulting .exe file is the assembly.
The Parts of an Assembly
An assembly is constructed with a few different pieces of information. Figure 22.2 shows a rough schema for the different pieces of an assembly.
Figure 22.2. Anatomy of an assembly.
An assembly can span multiple files or can be entirely ...
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