What is a Friend Assembly?

A pal assembly, in C#, refers to the .NET assembly that can Access the contributors of another meeting. Members in an assembly which might be accessed from friend assembly need to be marked as Internal.

Friend assemblies are used in Eventualities where there is a need to get right of entry to internal lessons and contributors in a single meeting from any other precise meeting. It enables particular assemblies to percentage members or capability without making them Public.

Friend assemblies are also utilized in uNit checking out where the assembly underlying the test Code desires to access the individuals that are marked as inner inside the assembly to be tested. It is useful in improvement of sophistication libraries that require additions contained in separate assemblies which need to get right of entry to participants in present assemblies.

What Does Friend Assembly Mean?

By marking individuals of a Class as inner, they're visible to other classes inside the same assembly however are non-public for classes that live out of doors the meeting. To get right of entry to the internal participants from a chum meeting, name of buddy meeting ought to be designated with the Characteristic, InternalsVisibleToAttribute in the assembly in which the internal participants are described. Friend meeting can't access non-public kinds and Private participants.

For Instance, InternalsVisibleToAttribute in Assembly X may be used to specify Assembly Y as pal assembly, in order that Assembly Y can get entry to all kinds and individuals of Assembly X which are marked as inner.

Following are the pointers related to development of pal assemblies:

• While the usage of signed assemblies , the Device, ‘sn.Exe’ may be used to get the Public Key that has to be passed to the characteristic specifying pal assembly
• While compiling a chum assembly that accesses inner members of another meeting, the Compiler alternative (/out) needs to be set with the call of the Output File (.Exe or .Dll)
• It is important to explicitly specify every meeting that wishes to be buddy for the assembly to which it desires get entry to
• It is recommended to use pal assemblies without breaking the policies of Encapsulation