What is Assembly

It is the unit of deployment for the Microsoft .NET framework and takes the form of an executable (.exe) file or dynamic-link library (DLL). Assembly is logical unit of code. All the .NET assemblies contain the definition of types, versioning information for the type, meta-data, and manifest. Assemblies are a collection of Single-File and Multiple-File. An assembly is the primary unit of deployment, security, and version control in the .NET Framework. The .NET Framework (version 2.0) includes 51 assemblies.

Before we can use a class contained in an assembly in our application, we must add a reference to the assembly.

  • mscorlib.dll
  • System.dll
  • System.Configuration.dll
  • System.Web.dll
  • System.Data.dll
  • System.Web.Services.dll
  • System.Xml.dll
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    There are two types of assemblies:

    • Private: A private assembly can be used by only a single application.
    • Shared: A shared assembly can be used by all applications located on the same server.(also called strong named assemblies) are copied to a single location (usually the Global assembly cache) GAC.

    Advantages of using assemblies

    1.It increase the overall Performance
    2.It can use the N-tier Architecture
    3.Used for business Logic
    4.Better user interaction
    5.Easy to manage the code

    Conclusion

    Hope this blog would have helped you in understanding Assemblies in VB.NET.