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Introducing C# and the

.NET Platform

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The Philosophy of .NET

E

very few years or so, the modern-day programmer must be willing to perform a self-inflicted

knowledge transplant to stay current with the new technologies of the day. The languages (C++,

Visual Basic 6.0, Java), frameworks (OWL, MFC, ATL, STL), architectures (COM, CORBA, EJB), and

APIs (such as .NET’s Windows Forms and GDI+ libraries) that were touted as the silver bullets of

software development eventually become overshadowed by something better or at the very least

something new. Regardless of the frustration you can feel when upgrading your internal knowledge

base, it is frankly unavoidable. To this end, the goal of this book is to examine the details of Microsoft’s

current offering within the landscape of software engineering: the .NET platform and the C# pro-

gramming language.

The point of this chapter is to lay the conceptual groundwork for the remainder of the book.

Here you will find a high-level discussion of a number of .NET-related topics such as assemblies, the

common intermediate language (CIL), and just-in-time (JIT) compilation. In addition to preview-

ing some key features of the C# programming language, you will also come to understand the

relationship between various aspects of the .NET Framework, such as the common language run-

time (CLR), the Common Type System (CTS), and the Common Language Specification (CLS).

This chapter also provides you with a survey of the functionality supplied by the .NET

base class libraries, sometimes abbreviated as the BCL or alternatively as the FCL (being the

Framework class libraries). Finally, this chapter overviews the language-agnostic and platform-

independent nature of the .NET platform (yes it’s true, .NET is not confined to the Windows

operating system). As you would hope, all of these topics are explored in further detail throughout

the remainder of this text.