As a strongname uniquely identifies an assembly this is the best way to reference them.Ī binary blob inside an assembly that can be verified as the digital signature of the assembly (i.e. Hopefully these definitions can help everyone understand the difference between the two.Īn assembly filename with a version number, a culture and a public key token.

Strongnames can be difficult to understand because they serve a dual purpose: manageability and security. The GAC is built on the foundation of strongnames. The GAC is for manageability (avoiding DLL hell). Note that the GAC has nothing to do with security! In fact assemblies in the GAC aren’t verified when loaded from the runtime. the GAC requires all it’s assemblies to be strongnamed and signed). A strongname is considered a unique entry in the GAC (i.e. The GAC is a black boxed repository of assemblies capable of keeping multiple version/cultures of a same assembly. When an application is launched, Mono extracts the name of the assembly, the version and its public key token and loads the required assembly from the GAC. The use of the GAC is encouraged for assemblies that will be used by more than one application on the system, and also for assemblies that are expected to be versioned in the future. The GAC allows multiple versions of the same assembly to be installed concurrently and also prevents different assembly vendors from overwriting each other’s assemblies. The Global Assembly Cache (GAC) is a central repository for storing shared assemblies. All assemblies provided by Mono are stored in the GAC. Lastly, if an assembly was still not found, Mono searches the the Global Assembly Cache (GAC), a repository of shared assemblies. To set this variable in Linux, if you use the bash shell, type: export MONO_PATH=/path/to/assemblies:/another/path/to/assemblies The environment variable should be a colon-separated list of paths to search for assemblies. If a required assembly isn’t found there, Mono searches the MONO_PATH environment variable. If your application uses assemblies not provided by the runtime, you may place them all in the same directory so that Mono may find them. It first searches the location of the executing assembly.

An application may use any number of assemblies, some of which may come with the runtime, some of which may be optional runtime components, and others might be written by third-party developers.Īt run time, Mono looks in three places for assemblies necessary to run a program. In addition to an application’s own assembly, all Mono applications reference the mscorlib assembly, which contains the core class libraries of the runtime. Application code is always split between many assemblies.

Fully sign a dll file