User`s guide

316 VEE User’s Guide
7 Using .NET with VEE
.NET Terminology
You will find these terms throughout the chapter, so use
these Microsoft definitions as a resource while you read or
you can review them now.
Assembly
“Components are packaged in assemblies. Assemblies are the
reusable, versionable, self- describing building blocks of .NET
applications. The simplest assembly is a single executable
that contains all the information necessary for deployment
and versioning. An Assembly is the fundamental building
block of the .NET Framework. It takes the form of an
executable (.exe) or dynamic link library (.dll) file.”
Primary Interop Assembly (PIA)
“A primary interop assembly is a unique, vendor- supplied
assembly that contains type definitions (as metadata) of
types implemented with COM. There can be only one
primary interop assembly, which must be signed with a
strong name by the publisher of the COM type library.”
Namespace
“.NET Framework types use a dot syntax naming scheme
that connotes a hierarchy. This technique groups related
types into namespaces so they can be searched and
referenced more easily. The first part of the full name — up
to the rightmost dot — is the namespace name(*). The last
part of the name is the type name. For example,
System.Collections.ArrayList represents the ArrayList type,
which belongs to the System.Collections namespace. The
types in System.Collections can be used to manipulate
collections of objects.”
*Nested classes are an exception to this general rule. Please
see MSDN documentation for further details.