Is versioning applicable to private assemblies?

Versioning concept is only applicable to global assembly cache (GAC) as private assembly lie in their individual folders.

Where is version information stored of an assembly ?

Version information is stored in assembly in manifest.

What is Manifest?

Assembly metadata is stored in Manifest. Manifest contains all the metadata needed to do the following things  (See Figure Manifest View for more details):
√ Version of assembly
√ Security identity
√ Scope of the assembly
√ Resolve references to resources and classes.
√ The assembly manifest can be stored in either a PE file (an .exe or .dll) with Microsoft intermediate language MSIL) code or in a stand-alone PE file that contains only assembly manifest information.

What is Difference between NameSpace and Assembly?

Following are the differences between namespace and assembly :
√ Assembly is physical grouping of logical units. Namespace logically groups
classes.
√ Namespace can span multiple assembly.

What is NameSpace?

Namespace has two basic functionality :-
√ NameSpace Logically group types, example System.Web.UI logically groups
our UI related features.
√ In Object Oriented world many times its possible that programmers will use the
same class name.By qualifying NameSpace with classname this collision is able to
be removed.

What are the different types of Assembly?

There are two types of assembly Private and Public assembly. A private assembly is normally used by a single application, and is stored in the application's directory, or a sub-directory beneath. A shared assembly is normally stored in the global assembly cache, which is a repository of assemblies maintained by the .NET runtime. Shared assemblies are usually libraries of code which many applications will find useful, e.g. Crystal report classes which will be used by all application for Reports.

What is a Assembly?

Assembly is unit of deployment like EXE or a DLL.

√ An assembly consists of one or more files (dlls, exe’s, html files etc.), and represents a group of resources, type definitions, and implementations of those types. An assembly may also contain references to other assemblies. These resources, types and references are described in a block of data called a manifest. The manifest is part of the assembly, thus making the assembly self-describing.

√ An assembly is completely self-describing.An assembly contains metadata information, which is used by the CLR for everything from type checking and security to actually invoking the components methods. As all information is in the assembly itself, it is independent of registry. This is the basic advantage as compared to COM where the version was stored in registry.

√ Multiple versions can be deployed side by side in different folders. These different versions can execute at the same time without interfering with each other. Assemblies can be private or shared. For private assembly deployment, the assembly is copied to the same directory as the client program that references it. No registration is needed, and no fancy installation program is required. 100 When the component is removed, no registry cleanup is needed, and no uninstall program is required. Just delete it from the hard drive. √ In shared assembly deployment, an assembly is installed in the Global Assembly Cache (or GAC). The GAC contains shared assemblies that are globally accessible to all .NET applications on the machine.