The .NET Framework Class Library | The .NET and COM Interoperability Handbook (Integrated .Net)


Team-Fly

	.NET and COM Interoperability Handbook, The By Alan Gordon
	Table of Contents

	Chapter One. What's in a Name ?

The .NET Framework Class Library

All programming languages contain a library of functions and/or classes that provide services to programmers developing software using that language. Examples of these services include string and memory manipulation, file and console Input/Output (I/O), mathematics, date and time manipulation, currency, collections, graphical user interface (GUI), threading, and networking. The need for these libraries can be expressed in one word: reuse. If programmers using a particular language do not have a library of commonly used routines to draw from, they would have to write their own code to implement all of the services, dramatically increasing the cost of developing applications using that language. The .NET Framework class library is a set of classes that provide all of the aforementioned services: string and memory manipulation, file and console I/O, etc. The .NET Framework class library also provides classes that handle security, configuration, diagnostics, messaging, globalization, and reflection (metadata inspection and generation). The .NET Framework class library is composed of several hundred classes. It would be difficult to get your arms around the classes if they weren't broken up into what are called namespaces. Namespaces are just a way of grouping related classes together into a common naming scope. Class names only need to be unique in their naming scope, although the classes in the .NET Framework class library are unique across all namespaces. Table 1-1 shows the list of namespaces in the .NET Framework class library and some of the key classes in each namespace.

The key advantage of the .NET Framework class library is that, because these classes are implemented using a CLR-compliant compiler (they are written in C#) and they adhere to the CLS, you can use them from any CLR-compliant programming language. You can even create your own subclasses by inheriting from classes in the .NET Framework class library regardless of what language you are using. If you are a Visual C++ programmer, you can imagine that the .NET Framework class library is a language-independent version of the Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC).

The .NET Framework class library is implemented as a set of assemblies. You can find these assemblies beneath the Framework directory of your Microsoft .NET installation. On my machine, these files reside at D:\WINNT\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.0.3705\ . The leaf directory in this path ( v1.0.3705 ) is correct for the 1.0 release version of the .NET Framework, but your number may vary. A number of assemblies are in this directory, and most of them they have the same name as their namespace. For instance, the security classes can be found in System.Security.DLL, and the messaging classes can be found in System.Messaging.DLL. The classes in the System namespace are an exception to this naming convention; they can be found in mscorlib.dll.

Table 1-1. Namespaces and key classes in the .NET Framework class library.

Namespace	Description	Key Classes
System	Contains all of the basic types	Object, Array, String
System.Collections	Contains classes for managing collections of objects	Queue, Dictionary, Hashtable, SortedList, Stack
System.IO	Contains classes for file-based I/O and reading and writing data streams	File, FileStream, MemoryStream, StreamReader, StreamWriter
System.Net	Contains types for network communication	WebRequest, WebResponse, TcpClient, TcpListener, Sockets
System.Security	Contains types that enable security features	Permissions, Policy, Cryptography
System.Globalization	Contains types that support internationalization	Calendar, CultureInfo
System.Runtime.Remoting	Contains types that allow for managing remote objects	ChannelServices, Remoting Services
System.Runtime.InteropServices	A collection of types that support using COM objects	Marshal, COMException
System.Data	The types that make up ADO.NET	DataSet, DataTable
System.Web	The types that support Web browser to server communications	HttpApplication, HttpContext, HttpRequest, HttpResponse
System.Web.UI	The types that support ASP.NET Web Forms	Page, Control, UserControl
System.Web.Services	The types that support ASP.NET Web services	WebService, WebMethodAttribute
System.Windows.Forms	Types that support the creation of Windows rich client applications	Form, Control, TreeView, ListView
System.EnterpriseServices	Types that support using COM+ services	ServicedComponent, ContextUtil, TransactionAttribute
System.XML	Types that provide support for processing XML	XmlDataDocument, XmlReader, XmlWriter


Team-Fly

Top