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As you start to learn about .NET and read the different books out there along with the assemblies, you are going to hear about the manifest. And let's talk here just briefly about what a manifest is. A manifest for the most part is a part of the assembly. It is a collection of data about the assembly. Now whereas the assembly is the collection of code, the manifest is the part that stores the data about the code. Now in the old com world we would hit an interface, a standard interface and it would basically expose the type library for a DLL. And it would give us a list of classes that were in that DLL, a list of the members of that DLL; by that I mean the set procedures, the functions, the properties, the fields and so forth. And that's exactly what a manifest does for an assembly. Notice a manifest enumerates the files in the assembly or it lists them, and it creates a list of them. It handles references to the assembly. It enumerates other dependant assemblies, so if this assembly is dependant on other assemblies or other assemblies are dependant on this assembly, the manifest keeps that information. The way we build them, our assemblies, in visual studio either through a command line, command prompt designation, determines what those dependencies are with other assemblies. Now the manifest provides self-description; it is the magical part of the assembly that causes the thing to describe itself. And the manifest now can be stored a couple of ways. Most of the time you are going to see the manifest stored inside the assembly along with the code that we saved. Now it is possible to store the manifest in a stand-alone 'PE' file. This is a more advanced technique but it is possible to do that. Now one thing about assemblies and manifests, Microsoft has given us a lot of control over these things. We can group files into an assembly, we can group assemblies together in a global assembly cache and make them shared, we can apply strong names to these assemblies, and then with the manifest they can either store this in each assembly or in standalone 'PE' file. So you have a lot of control and the best thing I can encourage you to do is to do a little outside reading, either in the SDK or in some third party books that happen to be written alongside your learning style. Find those books and read through them and assembly and a manifest to see what's going on. Understand how these things work because they are the magic of .NET. Now in the next section of videos we are going to take a look at visual studio 7 and you are going to be really surprised and pleased, I think, with what you find there. So I'll see you and we'll take a look at visual studio 7.