What is the Common Language Runtime?
Great question. The Common Language Runtime (CLR) is that part of the .Net environment which executes programs. The great thing about the CLR isn’t the CLR itself, but the fact that languages which are developed to run under the CLR have interoperability. Microsoft says that “.Net languages are only lenses through which programmers see the same underlying framework.” What that means, in theory, is that code that you write in VB.Net can run in the Visual C++ or Visual C# environment WITHOUT modification. Even better, if the .NET framework is ported to run on Unix or Macintosh PC’s, the code will also run–WITHOUT modifications.
