.Net Technology – In a Nut Shell

Assemblies

• What is an Assembly?
  
  
• What are Private and Shared assemblies?

What is an assembly?

• An assembly is the primary building block of a .Net Framework application. It is a collection of functionality that is built, versioned and deployed as a single implementation unit (as one or more files).
  
  
• All managed types and resources are marked either as accessible only within their implementation unit, or as accessible by code outside that unit.
  
  
• Assemblies are self-describing by means of their manifest, which is an integral part of every assembly.
  
  
• The self-describing nature of assemblies also helps make zero-impact install and XCOPY deployment feasible.

What are Private and Shared Assemblies?

• A Private assembly is used only by a single application and is stored in that application’s install directory.
  
  
• A Shared assembly is one that can be referenced by more than one application. In order to share an assembly, it must be explicitly built for this purpose by giving it a cryptographically strong name.

MSIL

• Microsoft Intermediate Language is the CPU-independent instruction set into which the .Net Framework programs are compiled.
  
  
• It contains instructions for loading, storing, initializing and calling methods on objects.
  
  
• Combined with metadata and the common type system, MSIL allows for true cross-language integration.
  
  
• Prior to execution, MSIL is converted to machine code. It is not interpreted.

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