Common Language Runtime (CLR)

The common language runtime makes it easy to design components and applications whose objects interact across languages. Objects written in different languages can communicate with each other, and their behaviors can be tightly integrated. For example, you can define a class and then use a different language to derive a class from your original class or call a method on the original class. You can also pass an instance of a class to a method of a class written in a different language. This cross-language integration is possible because language compilers and tools that target the runtime use a common type system defined by the runtime, and they follow the run time's rules for defining new types, as well as for creating, using, persisting, and binding to types.

Language compilers and tools expose the runtime's functionality in ways that are intended to be useful and intuitive to their developers. This means that some features of the runtime might be more noticeable in one environment than in another. How you experience the runtime depends on which language compilers or tools you use. For example, if you are a Visual Basic developer, you might notice that with the common language runtime, the Visual Basic language has more object-oriented features than before. The following benefits of the runtime might be particularly interesting to you:

·         Performance improvements.

·         The ability to easily use components developed in other languages.

·         Extensible types provided by a class library.

·         New language features such as inheritance, interfaces, and overloading for object-oriented programming; support for explicit free threading that allows creation of multithreaded, scalable applications; support for structured exception handling and custom attributes.