c# - Assembly names and versions

Question

What is considered as best practice when it comes to assemblies and releases?

I would like to be able to reference multiple versions of the same library - solution contains multiple projects that depend on different versions of a commonutils.dll library we build ourselves.

As all dependencies are copied to the bin/debug or bin/release, only a single copy of commonutils.dll can exist there despite each of the DLL files having different assembly version numbers.

Should I include version numbers in the assembly name to be able to reference multiple versions of a library or is there another way?

Answer 1

Assemblies can coexist in the GAC (Global Assembly Cache) even if they have the same name given that the version is different. This is how .NET Framework shipped assemblies work. A requirement that must be meet in order for an assembly to be able to be GAC registered is to be signed.

Adding version numbers to the name of the Assembly just defeats the whole purpose of the assembly ecosystem and is cumbersome IMHO. To know which version of a given assembly I have just open the Properties window and check the version.