An assembly manifest is metadata that describes everything about the assembly, including its identity, a list of files belonging to the assembly, references to external assemblies, exported types, exported resources, and permission requests. In short, it describes all the details that are required for component plug-and-play. Since an assembly contains all these details, there's no need for storing this type of information in the registry, as in the COM world. An assembly can be a single-module assembly or a multi-module assembly. In a single-module assembly, everything in a build is clumped into one EXE or DLL, an example of which is the hello.exe application that we developed earlier. This is easy to create because a compiler takes care of creating the single -module assembly for you. A multi-module assembly is one that contains many modules and resource files. To create it you have to use the Assembly Linker (al.exe) that is provided by the .NET SDK. This tool takes one or more IL or resource files and spits out a file
with an assembly manifest. Any .NET language may be converted into IL, so .NET supports multiple languages and perhaps multiple platforms in the future (as long as the target platforms have a CLR).
with an assembly manifest. Any .NET language may be converted into IL, so .NET supports multiple languages and perhaps multiple platforms in the future (as long as the target platforms have a CLR).