Pro .NET Framework with the Base Class Library: Understanding the Virtual Execution System and the Common Type System

Appendix: Advanced Operations

This appendix will cover the peculiarities of the execution system when dealing with class libraries. The appendix will also talk about decisions we need to make when using native programming languages and managed programming languages.

Unmanaged Code and Managed Code

Most developers already know the fundamentals of how the C and C++ programming languages work with memory blocks. These buffers are viewed and manipulated in code as a sequence of positions. Random access memory (RAM) is organized into bytes. The first byte is at the physical memory address of 0, and the numbering follows consecutively to the last byte, which is in the last physical memory address N-1. Blocks are used to facilitate the navigation ...