An assembly in the .Net world is nothing but a DLL or an exe. It is a basic building block of any .Net application. An Assembly contains metadata and manifest information. The reason for the emergence of assembly concept was to overcome the common "DLL Hell" problem in COM. The assembly contains all the code, resources, metadata and even version information. Metadata contains the details of every "type" inside the assembly. In addition to metadata, assemblies also have a special file called Manifest. It contains information about the current version of the assembly, culture information, public key token if available and other related information.Assembly overcomes the famous DLL Hell problem. Previously, we were forced to have one version of DLL installed or rather registered on the system. The drawback was that if the same DLL is used in two components, fixing problems in one component would lead to causing problems on the other as the same DLL was used in both components. Now, with DLL we can have multiple versions of the same DLL . Also, we do not use registry anymore. If any assembly needs to be shared it is through Global Assembly Cache (GAC) and it can hold multiple versions of the same DLL.There is a tool called ildasm which can used to view the assembly information. There is also a .Net reflector which can be used to dig into assembly details.Functions of an assembly :
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