C# 4.0 Unleashed

How Assemblies Get Loaded at Runtime

Now that you’ve seen how assemblies get referenced at development time, we can take a look at how the runtime locates assemblies at runtime. Given an assembly that has references to other assemblies, how does the runtime find them (and when)?

Xcopy Deployment

One of the early goals of the .NET Framework was to simplify the deployment model for applications. This was known as the “xcopy deployment” vision, meaning one can just copy an application’s binaries to some folder and run the application from that location as is, without requiring any registration or so on. In the world of COM, there was a much higher burden on installing and running applications because components typically required registration in ...