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Starting .Net

Posted on 20 Dec 2005 at 11:53

In a new Real World column, Thomas Lee will be covering Microsoft's .NET platform as it affects IT professionals

One of the more useful utilities in the SDK is ILDASM.EXE, which can display the assembly's manifest, and disassemble its metadata as shown in Figure 3. ILDASM makes it possible for you to see what a progam is doing, and even to do a bit of reverse engineering on it.

Whenever a managed application like the 'Hello world' application begins to run, a component of the CLR called the Assembly loader, starts to load the assembly. First, it makes security checks against the computer's security policy to ensure the application is allowed to be executed (I'll be explaining Code Access Security in more detail in a future column). Next, the MSIL for those classes that are to be executed gets compiled. Finally, the Code Manager begins to execute the application. While the managed application is running, it can call on a number of services provided by the CLR, including Garbage Collection, the Exception Manager, thread support and Com-interop. The CLR also contains a Global Assembly Cache (GAC) that retains commonly used assemblies for quick access. You can use the NGEN.EXE utility to store the native code for an assembly into the GAC, and this too I'll cover in a future column.

.NET Road Map

VS 2005, which Microsoft expects to release by the end of this calendar year, is an updated version of the .NET Framework (version 2) with a significantly improved Visual Studio 2005 and the Visual Studio Team and Foundation Servers. VS 2005 is tied both to Yukon (the next version of SQL Server) and Windows Server 2003 R2 (the next version of Windows Server 2003). Yukon is significant in that it can host the CLR, which means you can write stored procedures in managed code (although this probably won't become common practice). R2 is effectively Windows Server 2003, plus SP 1, plus some out-of-band applications like AD Federation Services, all rolled together, and it will install the .NET Framework by default. As this column was being written, Microsoft had shipped VS 2005 Beta 2, which includes Yukon and the updated components of Visual Studio 2005. In my next column, I'll take a look at VS 2005 in more detail.

To summarise, .NET represents a new API for applications as well as a new development and execution environment. It enables significantly higher developer productivity, with better security and manageability, but it's very different from traditional programming and needs new tools and approaches to management and optimisation, which is what this column will be about. If you have any comments or suggestions, please email me at Thomas.lee@qa.com, and do visit my web log at tfl09.blogspot.com.