Assemblies

Assemblies are self-describing units of functionality, consisting of code and metadata defining types and their members. Figure 24.3 in Chapter 24, “Namespaces,” illustrates what makes up an assembly. In this part of the chapter, we focus on a set of aspects associated with assemblies, ranging from build time to runtime. While exploring assemblies, we discuss their naming and versioning, the concept of strong naming and the Global Assembly Cache (GAC), how they get loaded, visibility aspects, and more.

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