What is an Assembly? What are the different types of Assemblies?

An Assembly is a collection of logical units. Logical units refer to the types and resources which are required to build an application and deploy them using the .Net framework. The CLR uses this information for type implementations. Basically, Assembly is a collection of Exe and DLLs. It is portable and executable.

There are two types of Assemblies, Private and Shared.

  • Private Assembly, as the name itself suggests, it is accessible only to the application. It is installed in the installation directory of the application.
  • Shared Assembly can be shared by multiple applications. It is installed in the GAC.