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Understanding the Probing Process

The .NET runtime resolves the location of a private assembly using a technique termed probing,

which is much less invasive than it sounds. Probing is the process of mapping an external assembly

request to the location of the requested binary file. Strictly speaking, a request to load an assembly

may be either implicit or explicit. An implicit load request occurs when the CLR consults the mani-

fest in order to resolve the location of an assembly defined using the .assembly extern tokens:

// An implicit load request.

.assembly extern CarLibrary

{ ... }

An explicit load request occurs programmatically using the Load() or LoadFrom() method of the

System.Reflection.Assembly class type, typically for the purposes of late binding and dynamic

invocation of type members. You’ll examine these topics further in Chapter 16, but for now you can

see an example of an explicit load request in the following code:

C H A P T E R   1 5  

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

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