Visual Basic 2015 Unleashed

The Architecture of the .NET Framework 4.6

To better understand the structure of the .NET Framework 4.6, think about it as a layered architecture. Figure 1.2 shows a high-level representation of the .NET Framework 4.6 architecture. The first level of the representation is the Windows operating system; the .NET Framework’s layer is located between the system and applications. The second level is the Common Language Runtime (CLR), which is the part of the .NET Framework that does the most work. We discuss the CLR later in this chapter. The next level is the Base Class Library (BCL), which provides all .NET objects that can be used both in your code and by Visual Basic when creating applications. The BCL also provides the infrastructure of several ...