Summary

This chapter introduced the facilities provided by the CLR's metadata system. Much of the basic functionality described here exists in other component architectures, albeit with some differences. A major difference between the CLR and COM/CORBA relates to the fact that the CLR does not use IDL to generate metadata. In this respect, the CLR more closely resembles SmallTalk and Java.

One predominant design consideration with component architectures is the move toward more dynamic and distributed systems. The CLR provides great support for both of these requirements; facilities such as automatic generation of proxy objects at runtime from their metadata and versioning and cultural attributes on assemblies address them at length. Chapter 6 discusses assemblies in more depth.