Visual Basic® 2010 Unleashed

Signing Assemblies with Strong Names

A strong name is basically a signature that is added to assemblies to provide uniqueness and represents the assembly’s identity. It is composed by the assembly name, version, and culture plus a public key and a digital signature. The public key is generated starting from the related private key, which is stored in the assembly manifest.

Security Issues

To avoid security issues, strong-named assemblies can only use type from other strong-named assemblies (such as the Base Class Library assemblies).

You have two modes for signing an assembly with a strong name; the first is invoking command-line tools such as Sn.exe and Al.exe. But because most of your developer life is spent within Visual Studio, the second ...