Understanding Assemblies

Abstract

In this chapter you’ll take a close look at assemblies, focusing in particular on the under-thehood implementations of the basic concepts behind assemblies. I’ll assume you’re familiar with the purpose of an assembly as well as related concepts such as metadata, modules, and the broad differences between public and shared assemblies, as well as basic techniques for compiling high-level code into assemblies—so I’ll go a bit beyond those topics and show the underlying structure of assemblies and the Global Assembly Cache (GAC).