Introducing .NET Assemblies

Summary

This chapter drilled down into the details of how the CLR resolves the location of externally referenced assemblies. You began by examining the content within an assembly: headers, metadata, manifests, and CIL. Then you constructed single-file and multifile assemblies and a handful of client applications (written in a language-agonistic manner).

As you have seen, assemblies may be private or shared. Private assemblies are copied to the Client’s subdirectory, whereas shared assemblies are deployed to the Global Assembly Cache (GAC), provided they have been assigned a strong name. Finally, has you have seen, private and shared assemblies can be configured using a client-side XML configuration file or, alternatively, via a publisher policy assembly.