Diving into the Common Language Runtime
Now that you know how assemblies are built, the time has come to focus on the runtime infrastructure the CLR offers. Actually, the concept of a runtime wasn’t groundbreaking at the time the CLR was introduced: Languages such as Visual Basic have had them for years, and so did Java with its virtual machine (JVM). What distinguishes the CLR from other runtimes, though, is the fact that it’s decoupled from any particular language. Also, the generalization of metadata through custom attributes was quite an innovative feature, as you read much more about throughout this book.
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