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Note

The Vista operating system is preconfigured with the necessary .NET runtime infrastructure. However, if

you are deploying your application to Windows XP or Windows Server 2003, you will want to ensure the target

machine has the .NET runtime environment installed and configured.

The Platform-Independent Nature of .NET

To close this chapter, allow me to briefly comment on the platform-independent nature of the .NET

platform. To the surprise of most developers, .NET assemblies can be developed and executed on

non-Microsoft operating systems (Mac OS X, numerous Linux distributions, and Solaris, to name a

few). To understand how this is possible, you need to come to terms with yet another abbreviation

in the .NET universe: CLI (Common Language Infrastructure).

When Microsoft released the C# programming language and the .NET platform, they also

crafted a set of formal documents that described the syntax and semantics of the C# and CIL lan-

guages, the .NET assembly format, core .NET namespaces, and the mechanics of a hypothetical

.NET runtime engine (known as the Virtual Execution System, or VES).

Better yet, these documents have been submitted to (and ratified by) ECMA International as

official international standards (http://www.ecma-international.org). The specifications of

interest are

•

ECMA-334: The C# Language Specification

•

ECMA-335: The Common Language Infrastructure (CLI)

The importance of these documents becomes clear when you understand that they enable

third parties to build distributions of the .NET platform for any number of operating systems

and/or processors. ECMA-335 is perhaps the more “meaty” of the two specifications, so much so

that is has been broken into various partitions, including those shown in Table 1-4.