C# assemblies, whats in an assembly?
I'm trying to understand the internal access modifier in C#. I can't seem to understand what an assembly is exactly, and what part of my program is held inside that assembly. I was trying to make it so that a variable is accessibly only by objects within the following namespace:
namespace Engine.Entity
The variable in question is defined in a class inside of that namespace, so I assumed if I made it internal, only objects inside of that namespace have access to it. I am seeing assemblies and namespaces as one, and I don't think that's right.
Answer
Namespaces affect name resolution only. Namespaces do not imply any sort of storage, nor do namespaces determine which DLLs contain your code. Namespaces allow you to group related things together under a logical name even though they may physically reside in different DLLs.
An assembly is basically just a DLL or EXE file. It contains IL code and type information that describes the code in that DLL or EXE. It can contain a lot of other stuff too, but for starters just think of it as a DLL.
You put your code into a particular assembly by compiling your code into a project (csproj) that produces the DLL or EXE.
A namespace can span multiple assemblies. That is, classes that are members of that logical namespace may reside in multiple DLLs. You can access a particular class in your source code only if your project references the correct assembly (DLL) that contains that class.
The Internal modifier means that the symbol can only be accessed from within the same assembly. Only code that is compiled into the same DLL as your code can access your properties or methods that are tagged with internal.