Primary Interop Assembly (PIA)

Deepak Dwij

Hi,
I want to know that What benefit do you get from using a Primary Interop Assembly (PIA)?

2 Replies

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Vulpes14y ago
The benefit of using a PIA for a particular COM component is that you are using the 'official' version produced by the author of the component which aids interoperability.

If you produce your own interop assembly using tlbimp.exe then it will be incompatible with an assembly produced by another developer because the types will not be regarded as being equivalent

This is no longer a problem from .NET 4.0 onwards which now supports type equivalence for linked interop types. So, if two assemblies each link to an interop type, those types are regarded as equivalent provided that they represent the same underlying COM type, no matter how they were generated. This, of course, means that PIAs are no longer needed.
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Hemant Kumar14y ago
An interop assembly is a collection of types that are deployed, versioned, and configured as a single unit. However, unlike other managed assemblies, an interop assembly contains type definitions (not implementation) of types that have already been defined in COM.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa302338.aspx
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