Primitive Types and Signatures

Chapter 7

Primitive Types and Signatures

Having looked at how types are defined in the common language runtime and IL assembly language (ILAsm), let’s proceed to the question of how these types and their derivatives are assigned to program items—fields, variables, methods, and so on. The constructs defining the types of program items are known as the signatures of these items. Signatures are built from encoded references to various classes and value types; I’ll discuss signatures in detail in this chapter.

But before we start analyzing the signatures of program items, let’s consider the building blocks of these signatures.