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Assemblies Are Self-Describing

Assemblies are regarded as self-describing in part because they record every external assembly it

must have access to in order to function correctly. Thus, if your assembly requires System.Windows.

Forms.dll and System.Drawing.dll, they will be documented in the assembly’s manifest. Recall

from Chapter 1 that a manifest is a blob of metadata that describes the assembly itself (name,

version, required external assemblies, etc.).

In addition to manifest data, an assembly contains metadata that describes the composition

(member names, implemented interfaces, base classes, constructors, and so forth) of every con-

tained type. Given that an assembly is documented in such vivid detail, the CLR does not consult

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the Win32 system registry to resolve its location (quite the radical departure from Microsoft’s legacy

COM programming model). As you will discover during this chapter, the CLR makes use of an

entirely new scheme to resolve the location of external code libraries.