What is an assembly?

Purpose:

• This is such as simple question that at first glance it may simply appear as an idiot test.
• As most interview questions the interviewer is actually asking a open ended question and the candidate should use the opportunity to illustrate the depth of their knowledge, as such be sure to go into assembly versioning, GAC etc...

Potential Answers:
An assembly is an executable piece of precompiled code. It gets executed by the .Net runtime environment. It is either a DLL or EXE. A .NET program consists of one or more assemblies.

Basically the interviewer simply wants to see that the developer understands that assemblies are the building blocks of .NET Full Framework applications. It is the basic unit of deployment, allows for version control of code, allows you reuse code, provides security mechanisms to prevent access to certain code.

In .NET Core, the building blocks are NuGet packages that contain assemblies PLUS additional metadata. (If developers illustrate an in depth knowledge of .Net Core it typically shows a passion for their craft)