It is necessary to discuss here about private and shared assemblies because of the difference in naming convention of assemblies in case of private and shared assemblies.

Private Assemblies

An application-private assembly is an assembly that is only visible to one application. The naming requirements for private assemblies are simple: The assembly names must only be unique within the application. There is no need for a globally unique name. Keeping the names unique is not a problem because the application developer has complete control over which assemblies are isolated to the application.

This version information is not enforced for private assemblies because the developer has complete control over the assemblies that are deployed to the application directory.

Shared Assemblies

The .NET Framework also supports the concept of a shared assembly. A shared assembly is one that is used by multiple applications on the machine.

Shared assemblies can be placed in the Global Assembly Cache where CLR first searches for the assemblies. The global assembly cache is a machine-wide store for assemblies that are used by more than one application. Since it is shared by many other applications, developers do not have full control over it and special care is needed in case of shared assemblies.

For example, a shared assembly must have a name that is globally unique. Also, the system must provide for "protection of the name"—that is, preventing someone from reusing another's assembly name.

The .NET Framework allows applications and administrators to override the version of an assembly that is used by the application by specifying version policies.