Advantages of using ASP.NET Assemblies

ASP.Net assemblies have a lot of advantages over the conventional DLLs that the developers develop earlier. In the case of DLLs if a DLL has to be shared with some other application, it has to be registered in that particular machine. In the case of assemblies there is no such registration needed.

All you have to do is to just copy the assembly and put in the bin directory of the application that is going to use it. It is as simple as that. In case you need to share a particular assembly with many other applications you can do so by placing the assembly in the Global Assembly Cache (GAC). Before you do so it is necessary that you give a strong name to that assembly.

Strong name is a unique name that is given to the assembly and it can be given using the sn.exe tool. Another advantage of using ASP.Net assemblies is the ability to read the contents of an assembly. Each assembly has a manifest that has details about the assembly itself. The System.Reflection namespace has classes like Assembly which can be used to get the details of the assembly and with that it is also possible to load an assembly dynamically at runtime!