Working with Assemblies and Modules
Assemblies will be covered in much more detail in Chapter 18, "Working with Assemblies." For the purpose of this conversation, it's enough to know that an assembly is a physical file that consists of multiple .NET PE files. An assembly's main benefit is that it enables you to semantically group functionality for easier deployment and versioning. The .NET runtime's representation of an assembly (and the apex of the reflection object hierarchy) is the Assembly class.
You can do many things with the Assembly class. Here are some of the more common tasks that we'll be looking at: -
- Iterate through an assembly's types
- List an assembly's modules
- Determine identification information, such as the assembly's physical file name and location
- Inspect versioning and security information
- Retrieve the assembly's entry point