Introduction
I have seen many people posting the questions about what is shared assemblly, What is private assembly, so I thought of bringing it in the articles section so that everyone could be benefitted from it. This article explains a mcuh needed introduction to new comers in .Net
ASSEMBLIES
Assemblies are basically the compiled code in .Net which contains the code in Microsoft Intermediate Langauge and one more thing that assembiles do for us as compared to dlls is they can maintain versioning with the help of the manifest.
You dont need to register the assemblies after compiling like we needed in dlls. you can put the assemblies in the bin folder and refer the namespaces from there.
In short find the assembly description as :
Assemblies are the building blocks of .NET Framework applications; they form the fundamental unit of deployment, version control, reuse, activation scoping, and security permissions. An assembly is a collection of types and resources that are built to work together and form a logical unit of functionality. An assembly provides the common language runtime with the information it needs to be aware of type implementations. To the runtime, a type does not exist outside the context of an assembly.
Differences Between Shared and Private Assemblies and how to use them.
Shared and Private Assembly: A private assembly is a assembly that is available to particular applications where they are kept. And cannot be references outside the scope of the folder where they are kept.
In contrast, Shared Assemblies are the assemblies that are accessible globally/shared across the machine to all the applications. For using the shared assemblies you need to register the assembly with a strong name in the global assembly cache(GAC) using gacutil.exe. GAC can be found on all the computers with .Net framework installed.
