.NET Framework Essentials, 3rd Edition

Appendix B. Common Acronyms

Table B-1 provides a listing of common acronyms or terms that you will come across in .NET-related reading materials and conversations. Some of these acronyms or terms have little relevance to .NET, but appear occasionally in this book, so we’ve provided them in this table for your convenience.

Table B-1. List of common acronyms

Acronym	Description
.ASMX	File extension for web services source-code files.
.ASPX	File extension for ASP.NET source-code files.
.config	File extension of .NET application configuration files.
ADO	ActiveX Data Objects.
ADO.NET	With goals similar to ADO, ADO.NET is the way to access data sources in .NET.
API	Application Programming Interface.
AppDomain	Short term to mean an application domain.
ASP	Active Server Pages.
ASP.NET	With goals similar to ASP, ASP.NET is the technology that supports the rapid development of Web Forms.
ATL	Active Template Library.
BLOB	Binary Large Object.
CAB Files	Cabinet files.
CCW	COM Callable Wrapper.
CLI	Common Language Infrastructure. This is the specification of the infrastructure and base-class libraries that Microsoft has submitted to ECMA so that a third-party vendor can build a .NET runtime on another platform. The CLR is Microsoft’s implementation of the CLI.
CLR	Common Language Runtime.
CLS	Common Language Specification.
CLSID	Class identifier used in COM.
COFF	Common Object File Format.
COM	Component Object Model.
COM Interop ...