When you dig into it, at the heart of Microsoft.NET is the Common Language Runtime (CLR). The .NET Framework is more than just a layer over the old Win32 API. In fact, in a way, it is its own operating system. It has its own security system, its own memory manager, its own error handling, and much, much more.
The goal of CLR Via C# is to explain all of these topics and show how to develop applications and reusable classes for the .NET Framework through the use of the CLR. Within the pages of this book you will learn how the CLR works and the facilities that it offers. This book is 896 pages divided into 29 chapters and five Parts.
Part I, "CLR Basics," begins by explaining the CLR 's execution model, how it works and how to execute it. This includes the native code generator, the framework class library, the common type system, and the common language specification.
Then you move on to building, packaging, deploying, and administering applications and types where you will see how to combine modules to form an assembly and perform simple deployment. You will also explore shared assemblies and strongly named assemblies.
Part II, "Designing Types," starts off by looking at the fundamentals of working with types, type safety, namespaces, and assemblies. This includes the minimum set of behaviors that a type can have. Then you will learn about primitives, reference, and value types.
After that it is on to the design of types by using the different kinds of members that can be designed within a type. Here you will explore topics such as constants and fields, methods, parameters, properties, and events. You will also explore generics and interfaces as well. These are all described in detail.
Part III, "Essential Types," now moves on to explaining the mechanics of working with characters and strings in the Microsoft.NET framework and then looks at enumerated types and arrays. Although these are common constructs, there are ways that the CLR and Framework Class Library (FCL) work together to offer new features.
Subsequently it is on to callback functions through the use of delegates and how these offer more functionality than what is available in unmanaged systems. You will see how custom attributes let information to be defined and applied to almost any metadata table entry, and how, even though it may be one of the weakest areas of the CLR, you still need to know what an error is and how to handle it.
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