A Programmer's Introduction to Visual Basic® .NET

Data Types and the CLS

Rather than focus on the actual rules of the CLS, it is more useful to examine the underlying data types in the CLR, how they map to VB .NET data types, and whether they are CLS-compliant. The good news is that all built-in VB .NET data types are CLS-compliant. However, it is possible to use data types in VB .NET that are provided by the .NET Framework that are not CLS-compliant. The following tables break the .NET Framework base types down into broad categories and then examine the .NET base data type, the built-in VB .NET data type, and whether it is CLS-compliant. If there is no built-in VB .NET data type, the data type is the same as the .NET base type. If a data type is not CLS-compliant, you would not want to expose ...