Programming Visual Basic .NET

Common Type System (CTS)

The CLI specification defines a rich type system that far surpasses COM’s capabilities. It’s called the Common Type System (CTS). The CTS defines at the runtime level how types are declared and used. Previously, language compilers controlled the creation and usage of types, including their layout in memory. This led to problems when a component written in one language tried to pass data to a component written in a different language. Anyone who has written Visual Basic 6 code to call Windows API functions, for instance, or who has tried to pass a JavaScript array to a component written either in Visual Basic 6 or C++, is aware of this problem. It was up to the developer to translate the data to be understandable to the receiving component. The CTS obliterates this problem by providing the following features:

• Primitive types (Integer, String, etc.) are defined at the runtime level. Components can easily pass instances of primitive types between each other because they all agree on how that data is formatted.

• Complex types (structures, classes, enumerations, etc.) are constructed in a way that is defined at the runtime level. Components can easily pass instances of complex types between each other because they all agree on how complex types are constructed from primitive types.

• All types carry rich type information with them, meaning that a component that is handed an object can find out the definition of the type of which the object is an instance. This ...