Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Important Parts of the CLI
Although most programmers don't need to know the details of the CLI specifications, you
should at least be familiar with the two specifications discussed in the following sections.
Common Type System (CTS)
The
Common Type System
(
CTS
) defines the characteristics of the types that must be used in
managed code. Some important aspects of the CTS are the following:
The CTS defines a rich set of intrinsic types, with fixed, specific characteristics for
each type.
The types provided by a .NET-compliant programming language generally map to some
specific subset of this defined set of intrinsic types.
One of the most important characteristics of the CTS is that
all
types are derived from a
common base class—called
object
.
Common Language Specification (CLS)
The
Common Language Specification
(
CLS
) specifies the rules, properties, and behaviors of a
.NET-compliant programming language.
The topics include data types, class construction, and parameter passing.
