Interview Questions - Part 3

Interview Questions
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26. How many types of assemblies are there?
a. 2 Types.
1. Private assemblies: which are used by only one application and are placed in the application's directory
2. shared assemblies: which are shared by many applications and are placed in machine wide code cache called global assembly cache.

27. What are main contents of an assembly
a. They are 4 contents
1. assembly manifest
2. Type metadata
3. msil that implements types
4. list of resouces

28. What is an assembly manifest?
a. Assembly manifest is main part of an assembly. it is used to store information about metadata like version information, security information, types info, scope of assembly etc.

29. What are the contents of an assembly manifest?
a. It contains name of the assembly,version information, culture information, strongname information, type reference information, list of files in assembly, and list of other assemblies

30. What is a global assembly cache?
a. Using this you can place assemblies at one common place. this common place is known as global assembly cache. the advantage of this global assembly cache is that the assemblies placed in this common place can be shared by many applications. they are not restricted to a particular application. they can be shared by any application. when you place an assembly in to global assembly cache that assembly should have a strong name. Global assembly cache is placed in the subdirectory of the systemroot directory.

31. What are the ways to keep assemblies in to global assemby cache?
a. 3 ways.
1. using windows installer
2. using global assembly cache tool
3. using windows explorer

32. what is advantage of windows installer ?
a. This should be used in the deployment time. this provides reference counting of an assembly.

33. what is a strong name?
a. when you want to place assembly in global assembly cache you should give strong name to that assembly. It contains assembly name, its version, public key and digital signature.This is used to uniquely identify an assembly, and to perform integrity checks on assembly. It ensures that no one can create a subsequent version of an assembly.

34. what are the advantages of global assembly cache?
a. 1. assemblies placed in GAC can be shared by multiple applications.
2. It provides security.
3. It provides a way to keep multiple versions of same assembly on the same machine.

35. can we place the contents of an assembly into different files?
a. Yes.