1/4/2007

An assembly is considered the basic unit of deployment, versioning, scoping and security in the .NET framework. Assemblies provide many benefits such as:

Assemblies must have version numbers, and each type and resource in the assembly shares the same version number. This makes it very easy for applications to refer to the correct version of files and avoid the DLL Hell. DLL Hell typically occurs when installing a new version of a shared library hinders older applications in operable.

Assemblies make it possible to deploy applications (and components) using zero-impact XCOPY and ClickOnce.

The Common Language Runtime is able to use security boundaries to restrict the set of operations to be executed based on the assemblies origin and identity.