Building Applications and Components with Visual Basic .NET

Building Assemblies

Before you can learn about assembly deployment, configuration, and versioning, you must understand how assemblies are named. Let's first look at the different parts that make up an assembly name and see how you control each aspect of an assembly name during the build process. Next, we'll consider how building an assembly with a public key and a digital signature can help to identify the assembly's producer and to detect traces of assembly tampering.

Assembly Naming

Each assembly has a name consisting of four parts:

• Friendly name

• Version number

• Culture setting

• Public key (or public key token)

Friendly Name

The friendly name of an assembly file is simply the file name without the extension. For example, the friendly name of an ...