What is strong naming and how do I strong name a binary?

Question

I heard somewhere that I need to strong name my binaries before I distribute them. Any ideas what this is?

Answer 1

Eric Lippert posted about strong signing assemblies recently:

The purpose of a strong name is solely to ensure that when you load an assembly by name, you are loading exactly the assembly you think you are loading. You say "I want to load Frobber, version 4, that came from FooCorp". The strong name gear ensures that you actually load precisely that DLL, and not another assembly called Frobber, version 4, that came from Dr. Evil Enterprises. You can then set security policy which says "if I have an assembly from FooCorp on my machine, fully trust it." These scenarios are the only by-design purposes of strong names.