4.15. Summary

The changes to the CLR in this release have three main aims:

• Improving performance

• Offering better compatibility/control for applications built in previous versions of the .NET Framework

• Introducing functionality necessary for enhancements such as the DLR and parallelization (refer to Chapter 3).

The great news is that many of the low-level changes will make your applications run more quickly with no input required from you! A simplified security model is welcome, and it is good to see the addition of 64-bit support and APIs for working with some of the new Windows 7 features. A number of welcome tweaks have also been made to the BCL and NCL. Finally, we looked briefly at code contracts: a great method inspired outside of .NET to write safer and more reliable code. Great job, CLR and BCL team!