Visual Basic® 2010 Unleashed

Information Stored Within Assemblies

An assembly doesn’t necessarily coincide with a standalone application. In many cases assemblies are also compiled class libraries. Independently from what kind of assembly you are working with, it exposes the following information:

• Types: Through the IL code necessary to the application execution, assemblies can expose reusable types that can be consumed by other assemblies. This is the reason why assemblies are considered the smallest unit for code reuse.

• Version: Assemblies contain version information, and all modules within the assembly have the same version; this is important to the CLR that can distinguish between assemblies with the same name but with different version numbers without registration. ...