.NET - .NET Framework

The CAS mechanism in .NET is used to control and configure the ability of managed code. Earlier, as this policy was applicable for only native applications, the security guarantee was limited. Therefore, developers used to look for alternating solutions, such as operating system-level solutions. This problem was solved in .NET Framework 4 by turning off the machine-wide security. The shared and hosted Web applications can now run more securely. The security policy in .NET Framework 4 has been simplified using the transparency model. This model allows you to run the Web applications without concerning about the CAS policies.

As a result of security policy changes in .NET Framework 4.0, you may encounter compilation warnings and runtime exceptions, if your try to use the obsolete CAS policy types and members either implicitly or explicitly. However, you can avoid the warnings and errors by using the <NetFx40_LegacySecurityPolicy> configuration element in the runtime settings schema to opt into the obsolete CAS policy behavior.

The .NET Framework is shipped with compilers of all .NET programming languages to develop programs. There are separate compilers for the Visual Basic, C#, and Visual C++ programming languages in .NET Framework. Each .NET compiler produces an intermediate code after compiling the source code. The intermediate code is common for all languages and is understandable only to .NET environment. This intermediate code is known as MSIL.

Lazy initialization is a process by which an object is not initialized until it is first called in your code. The .NET 4.0 introduces a new wrapper class, System.Lazy<T>, for executing the lazy initialization in your application. Lazy initialization helps you to reduce the wastage of resources and memory requirements to improve performance. It also supports thread-safety.

Memory management in the CLR is divided into three generations that are build up by grouping memory segments. Generations enhance the garbage collection performance. The following are the three types of generations found in a garbage collector:

• Generation 0 - When an object is initialized, it is said to be in generation 0.
• Generation 1 - The objects that are under garbage collection process are considered to be in generation 1.
• Generation 2 - Whenever new objects are created and added to the memory, they are added to generation 0 and the old objects in generation 1 are considered to be in generation 2.