.NET CLR Components

Microsoft .NET Framework, ASP.NET, Visual C# (CSharp, C Sharp, C-Sharp) Developer Training, Visual Studio

This article—.NET CLR Components—is from Essential .NET, Volume I: The Common Language Runtime, by Don Box, Chris Sells. Copyright © 2003 Microsoft Corp. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission. This article has been edited especially for C# Online.NET.

The authors discuss modules and assemblies, the component building blocks of the CLR, and examine the CLR loader, which allows more flexible deployment and versioning and ensures that the component's origin cannot be spoofed through the use of public keys and digital signatures.

The Type System

The CLR has its own set of concepts and techniques for packaging, deploying, and discovering component code. These concepts and techniques are fundamentally different from those used by technologies such as COM, Java, or Win32. The difference is best understood by looking closely at the CLR loader, but first one must look at how code and metadata are actually packaged.