Assemblies in C#

Read the first few paragraphs for a good general overview to get started.

Official documentation, giving a more detailed overview of assemblies in the .NET framework.

In case you might be wondering what exactly ".NET" is and how it relates to C#, this link explains it quite well.

To produce a distributable library from your C# program such that others can make use of your functions in their own programs, you will want to create a DLL (Dynamic Link Library) file. Thankfully, IDEs such as Visual Studio will do this for you!

This link gives a great introduction to the process with C# and Visual Studio.

Note: may not be necessary when using "Publish" for a project, as both dll and exe files are created for you.

No need to start a project; follow the simple instructions in the link to convert your current project from an "application" project that produces an exe file to a "class library" project that produces a dll.

An overview of what happens when you click the "run" button in Visual Studio, debug/release builds, and how to publish files and inspect the build outputs.

Describes how you can publish a "NuGet" package to the web, that others can easily search for and use in their own projects.

Note: not necessary to do this for most coding assignments, but certainly useful to know how it can be done!

Code compiled into an exe or dll file is already "protected" for most use cases, in that others using these files with a reference will not see your source code - only the available items that you have labelled as public.

However, various programs exist which can decompile these files, showing the full source code (though probably not very well formatted and easy to read compared to the original code). If your code contains sensitive information (or really, really good algorithms you don't want anyone stealing), you can look into the obfuscation methods mentioned in this article.