What is Strong Name in .Net?

Question

How to Sign an Assembly with a Strong Name?

Answer 1

Strong name is basic important features of .Net. Strong names are used to identified a shared assembly uniquely. Prior to .Net assembly names were protected with the help COM by using a GUID.
However there were the chances to create the different object with the same name. Strong name has solved both the problem. It is divided into four parts as

Assembly name
Version number
A public key
and a culture.

It is used for cryptography purpose. strong name is mandatory for public assemblies before keeping them into GAC(Global Assembly Cache).

How to assign Strong Name:

You can assign strong name to your assemblies with the help of Sn.Exe. it will generate a key for you then you can assign that key to your Assembly.

"Sn –k keypair.snk"  

will generate a 1024 bit’s public –private key pair in keypair.snk. Now you just have to add these attributes to your assembly such as
using System.Reflection;

[assembly: AssemblyVersion("02.01.1.0")]
[assembly: AssemblyKeyFileAttribute("TestKey.snk")] 

Answer 2

A strong name consists of the assembly's identity — its simple text name, version number, and culture information (if provided) — plus a public key and a digital signature.

The Windows Software Development Kit (SDK) provides several ways to sign an assembly with a strong name:

• Using the Assembly Linker (Al.exe) provided by the Windows SDK.
• Using assembly attributes to insert the strong name information in your code. You can use either the AssemblyKeyFileAttribute or the AssemblyKeyNameAttribute, depending on where the key file to be used is located.
• Using compiler options such /keyfile or /delaysign in C# and Visual Basic, or the /KEYFILE or /DELAYSIGN linker option in C++. (For information on delay signing, see Delay Signing an Assembly.)