.NET Assemblies

Introduction :
You must have heard the word assembly many times in .NET documentation. In this article I will share some thing about .NET assemblies.

What is an assembly?

The assembly which is used only by a single application is called as private assembly. Suppose you created a DLL which encapsulates your business logic. This DLL will be used by your client application only and not by any other application. In order to run the application properly your DLL must reside in the same folder in which the client application is installed. Thus the assembly is private to your application.
Suppose that you are creating a general purpose DLL which provides functionality which will be used by variety of applications. Now, instead of each client application having its own copy of DLL you can place the DLL in 'global assembly cache'. Such assemblies are called as shared assemblies.

What is assembly manifest?
Assembly manifest is a data structure which stores information about an assembly
This information is stored within the assembly file (DLL/EXE) itself
The information includes version information, list of constituent files etc.