Sams Teach Yourself C# in 24 Hours

By James Foxall and Wendy Haro-Chun

• Table of Contents
  • Copyright
  • About the Authors
  • Acknowledgments
  • Tell Us What You Think!
  • Introduction
  • Audience and Organization
  • Conventions Used in This Book
  • Onward and Upward!
  • Part I. The Visual Studio Environment
  • Hour 1. A C# Programming Tour
  • Hour 2. Navigating C#
  • Hour 3. Understanding Objects and Collections
  • Hour 4. Understanding Events
  • Part II. Building a User Interface
  • Hour 5. Building FormsPart I
  • Hour 6. Building FormsPart II
  • Hour 7. Working with the Traditional Controls
  • Hour 8. Advanced Controls
  • Hour 9. Adding Menus and Toolbars to Forms
  • Hour 10. Drawing and Printing
  • Part III. Making Things HappenProgramming!
  • Hour 11. Creating and Calling Methods
  • Hour 12. Using Constants, Data Types, Variables, and Arrays
  • Hour 13. Performing Arithmetic, String Manipulation, and Date/Time Adjustments
  • Hour 14. Making Decisions in C# Code
  • Hour 15. Looping for Efficiency
  • Hour 16. Debugging Your Code
  • Hour 17. Designing Objects Using Classes
  • Hour 18. Interacting with Users
  • Part IV. Working with Data
  • Hour 19. Performing File Operations
  • Hour 20. Controlling Other Applications Using Automation
  • Hour 21. Working with a Database
  • Part V. Deploying Solutions and Beyond
  • Hour 22. Deploying a Solution
  • Hour 23. Introduction to Web Development
  • Hour 24. The 10,000-Foot View
    • The .NET Framework
    • Common Language Runtime ( CLR )
    • Microsoft Intermediate Language
    • Namespaces
    • Common Type System
    • Garbage Collection
    • Summary
    • Q&A
    • Workshop
  • Appendix A. Answers to Quizzes/Exercises

Microsoft Intermediate Language

As you can see in Figure 24.1, all .NET code, regardless of the language syntax used, compiles to Intermediate Language (IL) code. IL code is the only code the CLR understands; it doesn't understand C#, Visual Basic, or any other developer syntax. It's IL that gives .NET its multilanguage capabilities; as long as an original source language can be compiled to IL, it can become a .NET language. For example, people are developing a .NET compiler for COBOL—a mainframe language with a long history. This compiler will take existing COBOL code and compile it to IL so that it will run within the .NET Framework using the CLR. COBOL itself isn't a Windows language and doesn't support many of the features found in a true Windows language (such as a Windows Forms engine), so you can imagine the excitement of COBOL programmers at the prospect of being able to leverage their existing code and programming skills to create powerful Windows applications.

Figure 24.1 These are the steps taken to turn developer code into a running component.

As .NET evolves, changes made to the CLR will benefit all .NET applications. For example, if Microsoft finds a way to further increase the speed at which forms are drawn to the screen by making improvements to the CLR, all .NET applications will immediately benefit from the improvement. Optimizations made to a specific syntax compiler, such as the one that compiles C# code to IL, are language specific, however. This means that even though all .NET languages compile to IL code and use the CLR, it's possible for one language to have small advantages over another because of the way in which the language's code is compiled to IL.

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