Assembly in Dot Net.

• Assembly is the smallest unit of deployment of a .net application. It can be a dll or an exe.
• An assembly provides a fundamental unit of physical code grouping.
• A chunk of (pre-compiled) code that can be executed by the .NET run time environment. A .NET program consists of one or more assemblies
• In the Microsoft .NET framework, an assembly is a partially compiled code library for use in deployment, versioning and security.
• Assembly is the fundamental part of programming with .NET Framework. It contain code that CLR executes MSIL (Microsoft Intermediate Language) code in a portable executable file will not be executed if it does not have an associated assembly manifest.

There are mainly two types to it:

1.       Private Assembly:  

      The dll or exe which is sole property of one application only. It is generally stored in application root folder

2.       Public/Shared assembly: 

      It is a dll which can be used by multiple applications at a time. A shared assembly is stored in GAC