This print for content only-size & color not accurate 7" X 9-1/4" / casebound / malloy

■

Note

Strong names also provide a level of protection against potential evildoers tampering with your assem-

bly’s contents. Given this point, it is considered a .NET best practice to strongly name every assembly (including

*.exe

assemblies) regardless of whether it is deployed to the GAC.

C H A P T E R   1 5  

■

I N T R O D U C I N G   . N E T  A S S E M B L I E S

506

8849CH15.qxd  10/22/07  1:46 PM  Page 506

---

Strongly Naming CarLibrary.dll

Let’s walk through the process of assigning a strong name to the CarLibrary assembly created ear-

lier in this chapter. The first order of business is to generate the required key data using the sn.exe

utility. Although this tool has numerous command-line options, all you need to concern yourself

with for the moment is the -k flag, which instructs the tool to generate a new file containing the

public/private key information. Create a new folder on your C drive named MyTestKeyPair and

change to that directory using the Visual Studio 2008 command prompt. Next, issue the following

command to generate a file named MyTestKeyPair.snk:

sn -k MyTestKeyPair.snk

Now that you have your key data, you need to inform the C# compiler exactly where

MyTestKeyPair.snk is located. When you create any new C# project workspace using Visual Studio

2008, you will notice that one of your initial project files (located under the Properties node of Solu-

tion Explorer) is named AssemblyInfo.cs. This file contains a number of attributes that describe the

assembly itself. The [AssemblyKeyFile] assembly-level attribute can be used to inform the compiler

of the location of a valid *.snk file. Simply specify the path as a string parameter, for example:

[assembly: AssemblyKeyFile(@"C:\MyTestKeyPair\MyTestKeyPair.snk")]