.NET Assemblies

Links

GAC	Global Assembly Cache	A machine-wide .NET assemblies cache for Microsoft’s CLR platform.
PE	Portable executable file	In the Microsoft Windows implementation of .NET, an assembly is a PE file. There are two types, process assemblies (EXE) and library assemblies (DLL)
	Private assembly	This means that the assembly can only exist in the application folder, or in a subfolder, and hence it is called a private assembly because it can only be used by a specific application.

The name of an assembly consists of four parts:

1	Short name	On Windows this is the name of the PE file without the extension.
2	Culture	In general, library and process assemblies should be culture neutral
3	Version	This is a dotted number made up for 4 values - major, minor, build and revision. The version is only used if the assembly has a strong name.
4	Public key token	This is a 64-bit hash of the public key which corresponds to the private key used to sign the assembly. A signed assembly is said to have a strong name.

List the global assembly cache:

"c:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003\SDK\v1.1\Bin\gacutil.exe" /l

To remove an assembly from the Global Assembly Cache:

"c:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003\SDK\v1.1\Bin\gacutil.exe" /u CSObjects