Strong Names for Assemblies

Part of the security model for .NET involves signing assemblies with strong names using a public/private key. Whilst appearing reasonably straightforward ("just" add a few lines to the AssemblyInfo file) - beware - it gets more complicated!

An assembly that is signed requires all the assemblies it uses to be so too. And if these are COM wrappers then they need signing!

For C# this is actually not difficult - a property of the project can be set (Wrapper Assembly Key File) and it's done. But for VB no such property exists. The only way is to sign/strong name each DLL - which means generating from a type library. Command line tools are required at this point, and if you don't have the TLB to work from it gets more difficult.

One approach we took was to use "The Regulator" and copy the source code (in C#) into a DLL of our own - and strong name that!

No doubt VS2005 fixes this but we're not in a position to upgrade...