What's the point of delay signing of an .NET assembly?

Question

I noticed that after I use AssemblyDelaySignAttribute to indicate that an assembly is in development and does not need to be signed now, I'll have to use sn -Vr foolib.dll to register for strong name verification to be turned off for this assembly.

What's the point of doing this circle? Why not just leave the assembly unsigned until it's fully done? Isn't that less bothering?

Answer 1

From AssemblyDelaySignAttribute Class

Delayed signing is used when the author of the assembly does not have access to the private key that will be used to generate the signature

Answer 2

A couple reasons...

1. Assemblies without a strong name cannot be added to the GAC
2. Related to #1, assemblies not in the GAC do not benefit much from NGEN
3. Strong named assemblies exhibit different behavior when it comes to assembly probing and loading with partial names.
4. Assemblies without a strong name cannot be referenced by a strong named assembly

So in organizations where the signing process is tightly controlled, it helps to be able to fake it out for development.