Chapter 1. CLR Hosts and Other Extensible Applications

The Common Language Runtime (CLR) lies at the heart of the Microsoft .NET initiative. It is the CLR that provides the runtime services required to execute the code you write to expose as Web services, Microsoft ASP.NET applications, rich client applications, database stored procedures, and so on. If you’ve worked much with the .NET Framework, you’re probably familiar with many of the high-level benefits of the CLR, such as automatic memory management (garbage collection), the common type system, and Code Access Security (CAS). However, the CLR possesses another key characteristic that you might not have spent as much time working with directly: its tremendous flexibility.

The extensibility ...

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