Friday, June 13, 2008

• What meant of assembly & global assembly cache (gac) & Meta data

Assembly :-- An assembly is the primary building block of a .NET based application. It is a collection of functionality that is built, versioned, and deployed as a single implementation unit (as one or more files). All managed types and resources are marked either as accessible only within their implementation unit, or as accessible by code outside that unit. It overcomes the problem of 'dll Hell'.The .NET Framework uses assemblies as the fundamental unit for several purposes:
1. Security
2. Type Identity
3. Reference Scope
4. Versioning
5. Deployment
Global Assembly Cache :-- Assemblies can be shared among multiple applications on the machine by registering them in global Assembly cache(GAC). GAC is a machine wide a local cache of assemblies maintained by the .NET Framework. We can register the assembly to global assembly cache by using gacutil command.

We can Navigate to the GAC directory, C:\winnt\Assembly in explore. In the tools menu select the cache properties; in the windows displayed you can set the memory limit in MB used by the GAC

MetaData :--Assemblies have Manifests. This Manifest contains Metadata information of the Module/Assembly as well as it contains detailed Metadata of other assemblies/modules references (exported). It's the Assembly Manifest which differentiates between an Assembly and a Module.

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