Shared Source CLI Essentials

Who Should Read This Book

This book is not about the C# language, the Visual Basic .NET language, the Base Class Libraries (BCLs), or any other part of the .NET Framework that has received marketing attention and lots of press coverage. This book is about the one piece of the .NET Framework that makes all of the above possible: the CLI standard. As standardized runtime plumbing, it plays a critical role in Microsoft’s .NET strategy. Its technical depth makes it an excellent subject for discourse.

To illustrate the finer points of the CLI standard, this book uses the Shared Source CLI as demonstration material. The book, however, is by no means a complete overview of Rotor. The compiler discussions, the detailed descriptions of its test harnesses, the coverage of BCL implementation details, and countless other subjects are missing. As a complex industrial codebase, Rotor deserves this kind of detailed attention; alas, this book isn’t where you’ll find it!

The target audience for this book falls mainly into four categories:

The research community

There has long been tremendous interest in virtual machines, and Rotor’s implementation of the CLI should provide many traditional research opportunities in areas, such as security, memory management, and code generation, as well as less traditional opportunities centered on the industrial, “real world” character of the heavily instrumented code.

The teaching community

Many curricula already include managed execution and its capabilities among ...