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C# Assembly Programming

  • Jun 11, 2009
You probably believe that .NET assembly management is complex and best left to gurus. But working with assemblies is a straightforward process if you use the right tools. Enterprise development and networking specialist Stephen B. Morris shows the way.
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Code Distribution: An Old Problem

Back in the late 1990s, when C++ was in the ascendancy, the humble dynamic-link library (DLL) was the accepted unit of Windows software distribution. DLLs represented shared libraries of code, and this model persists to the present day. However, the nomenclature has changed—nowadays, on the .NET platform, the term assembly is used instead of DLL. Assemblies offer a range of facilities designed to make life easier for software producers targeting the .NET platform. One such facility is language independence—code in an assembly can be used by any of the .NET languages. In this context, language independence helps to unify multi-language solutions.

However, unity between Java and the .NET languages currently remains an aspiration. This is most likely due to commercial considerations; neither side wants to add value to the other by bridging the two languages. I guess that's the price of having private companies driving the main global technologies! (Now that Java is an open source platform, we might see some progress in the future.)

Anyway, assemblies offer all the old advantages of DLLs as well as a number of new ones; for example, versioning, XML description, digital signing, location independence, and so on. We'll see some of these features later on in this article.

NOTE

The source code for this article is available for download as a set of two C# solutions for Microsoft Visual C# 2008 Express Edition. If you want to run the code yourself, just unzip the files into a folder, such as C:\assemblies. Then open the class library solution in Microsoft Visual C# 2008 Express Edition. This action will automatically build the source code and produce the necessary executable artifacts. Finally, open the second project and add a reference to the class library. This last step is achieved by using the command Project > Add Reference and browsing to the class library assembly file.

If you prefer an open source approach, you can use SharpDevelop instead of Microsoft Visual C# 2008 Express Edition.

Now let's take a look at the big picture of the application.

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