What are the features of .NET?

What are the features of .NET?

This article discuss the features of .NET - viz Assemblies, MSIL, Common Type System and Cross-language Interoperability

What are the features of .NET?

There are various features of .NET. Some of them are mentioned below namely:

• Assemblies
• MSIL
• Common Type System
• Cross-language Interoperability

Let us see each of these in brief:

Assemblies:

Assemblies can be a dll or a exe which contains the MSIL code which is executed by CLR. The things that are embedded in assemblies are namely interfaces, classes, files, version of assemblies and so on. The information about each assembly is present in assembly Meta data which would be used by CLR when executing the assembly. There are types of assemblies like

Private - These assemblies are used only by the application or the program to which they belong

Global assemblies - These are assemblies that are used throughout by any application.

MSIL:

MSIL also called as Microsoft Intermediate Language. The programs written in .NET are converted into MSIL also called as Microsoft Intermediate Language. These are then used by JIT also known as Just-in Time Compiler present in CLR which converts the MSIL into native code and then executed.

Common Type System:

Common Type System also called as CTS in short. This is used for cross-language integration. That is in other words we have seen that programs written in any language say VB.NET or ASP.NET and so on gets converted to MSIL and so the data types in all these languages must be converted to a standard data type which is defined as rules by Common Type System.

Cross-language Interoperability:

Cross-language Interoperability also called as CLS in short. This is supported by .NET. To make a program written in any language to be used in other it must be defined as rules followed by Cross-language Interoperability.

The above are some of the many features available in .NET

-R. Sripriya