What are the different types of Assembly?

There are two types of assembly Private and Public assembly. A private assembly is normally used by a single application, and is stored in the application's directory, or a sub-directory beneath. A shared assembly is normally stored in the global assembly cache, which is a repository of assemblies maintained by the .NET runtime. Shared assemblies are usually libraries of code which many applications will find useful, e.g. Crystal report classes which will be used by all application for Reports.

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