The Standard Framework

The Standard Framework adheres to the CLS, and is intended to be cross-language. Both the libraries and the execution environment are factored: being able to use certain libraries requires corresponding pieces of the execution environment.

A profile is a set of libraries, grouped together to form a consistent whole that provides a fixed level of functionality. A basic CLI profile, the Kernel Profile, includes the C# class library. The Compact Profile includes those libraries and, in addition, libraries for XML and reflection, enough for scripting languages like ECMAScript (better known under the product names "JScript" and "JavaScript").

Optional libraries include floating point numbers, decimal arithmetic, and multi-dimensional arrays.

Each library specifies the available types and how they are grouped into assemblies, the set of CLI features that support that library, and any modifications in the library to types defined in other libraries, such as the addition of methods and interfaces to types defined in other libraries and additional exceptions that may be thrown by this library. A framework, a term used extensively in this standard, consists of simply the available type definitions, without the additional supporting information.

The Standard Framework is published in a companion to this book, entitled the .NET Framework Standard Library Annotated Reference.