Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
The Identity of an Assembly
In the .NET Framework, the filenames of assemblies are not as important as in other operating
systems and environments. What is much more important is the
identity
of an assembly.
The identity of an assembly has four components that together should uniquely identify it.
These four components are the following:
Simple name
: This is just the filename without the file extension. Every assembly has a
simple name. It is also called the
assembly name
, or the
friendly name.
Version number
: This consists of a string of four period-separated integers, in the form
MajorVersion.MinorVersion.Build.Revision
. For example,
2.0.35.9
.
Culture information
: This is a string that consists of two to five characters representing a
language, or a language and a country or region. For example, the culture name for
English as used in the United States is
en-US
. For German as used in Germany, it is
de-DE
.
Public key
: This 128-byte string should be unique to the company producing the
assembly.
The public key is part of a public/private key pair, which is a set of two very large, specially
chosen numbers that can be used to create secure digital signatures. The public key, as its
name implies, can be made public. The private key must be guarded by the owner. The public
key is part of the assembly's identity. You will look at the use of the private key later in the
chapter.
