Assembly references

An assembly contains manifest which is a set of metadata that describes the contents of the assembly. Metadata in fact describes the dependencies and version information associated with an assembly. There are two types of assembly references. They are full assembly reference and partial assemble reference. A full assembly reference includes text name, version, culture and public key token. A full assembly reference is required if you refer any assembly which is part of the common language run time or any assembly located in the global assembly cache. Only partial information is provided in partial assembly reference. We can dynamically refer an assembly in partial assembly reference. One example of partial information is specifying only the assembly name. On obtaining the information, the run time searches for the assembly in the application directory. There exist two methods here. First method involves the checking for the assembly by the run time in the application directory. In the second method, run time checks for the assembly in the application directory and in the global assembly cache.