What is an Assembly?

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What is an Assembly?

Every time you create any kind of application or service using Visual Basic.NET you are building an Assembly. That is because Assemblies serve as the basic building blocks of the .NET Framework. They help to define versioning, code reuse, scoping rules and security permissions for all .NET applications. Probably the simplest understanding is that an Assembly is just a collection of types that form a logical unit of functionality and that is built to efficiently work together. If you search your hard drive you will find Assemblies as either an executable (.exe) or a dynamic link library (.dll) that was compiled using the .NET Framework. In this article we will explore some of the basic concepts and architecture of Assemblies and how they can be used within the .NET Framework. <more>