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An Overview of .NET Assemblies

Regardless of which .NET language you choose to program with, understand that despite the fact

that .NET binaries take the same file extension as COM servers and unmanaged Win32 binaries

(*.dll or *.exe), they have absolutely no internal similarities. For example, *.dll .NET binaries do

not export methods to facilitate communications with the COM runtime (given that .NET is 

not

COM). Furthermore, .NET binaries are not described using COM type libraries and are not regis-

tered into the system registry. Perhaps most important, .NET binaries do not contain platform-

specific instructions, but rather platform-agnostic 

intermediate language (IL) and type metadata.

Figure 1-3 shows the big picture of the story thus far.

Figure 1-3.

All .NET-aware compilers emit IL instructions and metadata.