BASIC FRAMEWORK STRUCTURE

Framework is designed for cross-language compatibility means its components can interact with each other even if they all are written in different languages. It is because of the unique compilation process of .NET, to understand that you need to understand the two main components of .NET

Common Language Runtime CLR.

.NET Framework Class Library or Base Class Library BCL.

Common Language Runtime CLR is an environment that manages the code execution, code compilation, thread management, memory allocation and garbage collection. So when the code is compiled it is not directly converted binary machine code rather into MSIL (Microsoft Intermediate Language) then CLR convert it into binary code.

Base Class Library BCL provides a collection of a useful and reusable types that are designed to integrate with CLR, these types are object-oriented and fully extensible.

This cross language compatibility and interoperability is possible only because of CLR. Data types are different in each language in their structure and references so Framework provides Common Type System CTS which ensures type compatibility and enforces strict type safety, like VB has Integer and C# has int and both are represented in MSIL as System.Int32, as vb and c# both uses common type system.

One another primary unit of .net application is ASSEMBLY: An Assembly is a self describing collection of code, resources and meta data. Assembly Manifest contains information about what is contained within assembly, like identity information , list of all types exposed by assembly, list of other assemblies required by assembly, etc. Each assembly contains only one assembly manifest. Further assemblies contains one or more modules which contains the code that makes up your application or library and contains meta data which describes that code.