Building e-Commerce Sites with the .NET Framework

Self-Describing Components

To take advantage of these services, the runtime requires metadata to be emitted by compilers. Metadata provides type information and information about references. All this information is stored with your code. The runtime uses this metadata to locate and load classes, enforce security, generate native code, resolve method invocation, and set up runtime context boundaries.

All managed components contain information, in the form of metadata, about every component, resource, and dependency they were built with. .NET components don't rely on the System Registry for versioning information. Each .NET component carries with it its identity (including name, version, culture, and public key), what types are exported, what types ...