The Common Language Runtime

To address the problems with COM contracts and their definitions, the COM and MTS teams at Microsoft set out to develop a new component platform called COM3. Soon after that name was chosen, various parties within Microsoft discovered that COM3 was not a legal directory name under certain Microsoft platforms, so they quickly changed the name to the Component Object Runtime (COR). Other names used during the development cycle included the COM+ Runtime, Lightning, and the Universal Runtime (URT), and then finally, just prior to its first public beta, the technology was renamed to the Common Language Runtime (CLR).

It is difficult to talk about the CLR without discussing the difference between a specification and an ...

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