Chapter Three. Exploring the CLR

In this chapter, I dig a little deeper into the CLR. In the .NET overview in Chapter 1, I briefly discussed metadata, MSIL, CTS, CLS, VOS, and VES. In this chapter, I dive deeper into all of these concepts. You will also understand what an assembly is and how the CLR locates assemblies, executes managed code, and enforces security. You'll learn how the CLR implements automatic memory management (garbage collection) and what changes you need to make to your programming style to take advantage of it. As I go through this material, keep in mind that, just as you didn't have to understand all the low-level details of the Win32 API to program on the Windows platform, you don't have to be an expert on the CLR to use .NET. Understanding how the CLR works will make you a better programmer though, and this knowledge will help you to be a true .NET expert.