Deployment Modes

There are two kinds of deployment in .NET framework.

They are (1) private deployment, in which assemblies are placed in the application’s base directory (or a subdirectory thereof) for the application’s sole use. Deploying assemblies privately gives a company a large degree of control over the naming, versioning, and behavior of the assembly.

(2) global deployment, in which assemblies can be accessed by multiple applications. The assemblies that ship with the Microsoft .NET Framework are an excellent example of globally deployed assemblies, because all managed applications use types defined by Microsoft in the .NET Framework Class Library (FCL).

Key differences are listed as: A private deployment is available to a particular applications where they are kept. And cannot be references outside the scope of the folder where they are kept. In contrast, global deployment are accessible globally/shared across the machine to all the applications. For using those assemblies you need to register the assembly with a strong name in the global assembly cache(GAC) using gacutil.exe. GAC can be found on all the computers with .Net framework installed. Therez an alternative without GAC and the solution is published at http://devcity.net/Articles/254/1/article.aspx. Based on the business need, you can choose the deployment mode.