Chapter 14. MSIL Programming

Microsoft Intermediate Language (MSIL) is the programming language of the Common Language Runtime (CLR) and the Common Instruction Language (CIL) for managed code. A managed application undergoes two compilations. The first compilation is from source code to MSIL and is performed by the language compiler. The second compilation occurs at run time, when the MSIL code is compiled to native code. The CLR performs the second compilation as part of process execution. From the perspective of the CLR, managed applications are simply MSIL code and metadata. The original source code language is unimportant to the CLR. For this reason, .NET is considered language-agnostic, or language-independent. One of the goals of the CLR ...

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