- 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
