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Understanding the Format of a .NET Assembly

Now that you’ve learned about several benefits provided by the .NET assembly, let’s shift gears and

get a better idea of how an assembly is composed under the hood. Structurally speaking, a .NET

assembly (*.dll or *.exe) consists of the following elements:

• A Win32 file header

• A CLR file header

• CIL code

• Type metadata

• An assembly manifest

• Optional embedded resources

While the first two elements (the Win32 and CLR headers) are blocks of data that you can typi-

cally ignore, they do deserve some brief consideration. This being said, an overview of each element

follows.