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Source Code

The MultifileAssembly project is included under the Chapter 15 subdirectory.

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Understanding Private Assemblies

Technically speaking, the assemblies you’ve created thus far in this chapter have been deployed as

private assemblies. Private assemblies are required to be located within the same directory as the

client application (termed the 

application directory) or a subdirectory thereof. Recall that when you

set a reference to CarLibrary.dll while building the CSharpCarClient.exe and VbNetCarClient.exe

applications, Visual Studio 2008 responded by placing a copy of CarLibrary.dll within the client’s

application directory (at least, after the first compilation).

When a client program uses the types defined within this external assembly, the CLR simply

loads the local copy of CarLibrary.dll. Because the .NET runtime does not consult the system reg-

istry when searching for referenced assemblies, you can relocate the CSharpCarClient.exe (or

VbNetCarClient.exe) and CarLibrary.dll assemblies to a new location on your machine and run

the application (this is often termed Xcopy deployment).

Uninstalling (or replicating) an application that makes exclusive use of private assemblies is a

no-brainer: simply delete (or copy) the application folder. Unlike with COM applications, you do

not need to worry about dozens of orphaned registry settings. More important, you do not need to

worry that the removal of private assemblies will break any other applications on the machine.