Chapter 53. Understanding the Global Assembly Cache

The Visual Studio IDE is a great place for creating applications, but in most cases you need to deploy them to your customers. The .NET Framework offers a nice infrastructure for accomplishing this, but you need to know some concepts about the infrastructure before effectively deploying applications. Often you can also create libraries and reference those libraries, or third-party libraries, other than the .NET Framework base libraries in your projects. Such libraries need to be deployed together with your application, but the .NET deployment model for assemblies works differently from the COM model. The goal of this chapter is to illustrate how .NET base libraries are organized, why you can be sure to find them on a target machine, and how you deploy your own libraries or third-party libraries that your applications work with. This information is important if you consider that deploying an application is not only deploying the executable, but also all libraries required by the application. This is the reason why you need to read this chapter before discovering the deploying modes offered by the .NET Framework and Visual Studio 2010.