Modules and Assemblies

Assemblies serve many roles, including the following:

• They serve as a typical unit for the deployment of code, associated metadata, and embedded resources.

• They act as a means to stimulate code reuse by building libraries that can be reused from different components or applications.

• They provide for a versioning story, resolving core issues that existed before in the world of COM with the “DLL hell.”

• Scoping and visibility allow for “programming in the large,” where aspects of an implementation can be hidden.

• Security decisions can be made based on an assembly’s identity, location, and so on, as well as based on permissions configured on it.

From a deployment point of view, assemblies can consist of one or more ...

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