2.8 Summary

As you can see from this chapter, the .NET architecture strives to support language integration and componentization in every way that makes sense. Thanks to metadata, programming becomes much easier because you no longer have to worry about the registry for component deployment and other kinks (such as CoCreateInstanceEx, CLSIDs, IIDs, IUnknown, IDL, and so forth) in order to support componentization. Thanks to the CTS, CLS, metadata, and IL, you now have real language integration. Microsoft has shipped a CLR for several flavors of Windows, and has released their shared-source implementation of the CLR that will run on FreeBSD and will no doubt be portable to other Unix-like systems.^[13] Non-Microsoft implementations of the CLR have also appeared, including DotGNU Portable.NET (for more information, see http://www.southern-storm.com.au/portable_net.html) and Mono (see http://www.go-mono.com). .NET is thus a multilanguage and multiplatform architecture.

^[13] You can download "The Shared Source CLI 1.0 Release" from Microsoft. The CLR is submitted to ECMA as the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI).