What are the benefits of using assemblies over traditional DLLs?

A traditional DLL is dependent on the Registry for maintaininginformation about it, whereas an assembly maintains all information about itself and doesnot depend on any Registry entries. Assemblies have the following benefits:

1) They are self-describing: Assemblies are self-describing deployable units..NET stores the metadata about the components in assembly manifests,which include the identity of the assembly (such as the name and theversion number), security information, information about the dependencies,and the list of files that constitute the assembly. In .NET, an application isalso made up of assemblies. Therefore, the information about the versionof a component used by an application is also maintained in the assembly.
2) They record the version information and enforce it at run time: Theassembly manifest also includes the information about the dependenciesbetween different assemblies, such as the name of the referencedassembly and its version number. This version number is used at run timeto ensure that the correct version of the dependency is loaded.
3) They provide the ability to work with side-by-side components: This feature allows multiple versions of a component to be installed and runsimultaneously. The caller of the assembly can specify the version to beloaded. Thus, the .NET Framework allows multiple versions of a singlecomponent to coexist on a machine. This feature also isolates theapplication from the changes made to the system by other applications.