About This Book

Along with the complete text of the CLI Standard, except for the portion describing the class libraries, this book contains some other information that may be of help.

Chapter 1 is an overview of CLI and describes, in context, where to go in this book to find specific technical areas.

Chapter 2 contains the annotated Partition I of this standard, an architectural overview and recommended to anyone who needs to understand the CLI. It also contains the specifications for the Common Language Specification (CLS), the restrictions on the CLI for anyone writing code that may be used across languages.

Chapter 3 is the part of the standard describing the semantics of metadata, with annotations. It contains the first 20 sections of Partition II, and uses an assembly language, ilasm, to describe these semantics.

Chapter 4 contains information that is not in the standard. It is an overview of the second half of Partition II, and describes how to find different areas of information. It also provides some information on the PE (Portable Executable) file format for managed files and its relation to the layout of metadata.

Chapter 5 contains the annotated second half of Partition II of the standard, sections 21 24, which describes the file format as it relates to managed files, and the physical metadata layout.

Chapter 6 is Partition III of the standard, which consists primarily of a detailed description of the Common Intermediate Language (CIL) instruction set. In addition, this chapter includes an annotated section important to both language designers and developers of Virtual Execution Systems that describes the effect of various numeric operations between types.

Chapter 7 is the annotated Partition IV, which is an overview of the CLI libraries, also describing what is, and is not, required for a conforming CLI implementation. In the International Standard, this Partition contains the Base Class Libraries in XML format. In this series, however, these are published in companion volumes entitled the .NET Framework Standard Library Annotated Reference.

Chapter 8 is the annotated Partition V, which is a set of annexes to the standard. These include sample programs in ilasm with corresponding annotations containing approximate high-level language examples for the same programs, implementation information for a version of ilasm, library design guidelines, and other information of interest to CLI implementers.

The Appendix in this book reprints the Microsoft Portable Executable and Object File Format Specification. This specification includes a good deal of information on the file format that is specific to Microsoft products and hence not standardized. This information allows you to see how the file format for managed code, described in Chapter 5, relates to the existing Microsoft Windows file format. It also helps clarify why the file format for managed code is more complicated than would be necessary if one were designing a portable format strictly for CIL. For those designing a Microsoft Windows compatible implementation of the VES, it describes how to handle unmanaged code.