Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles
available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. The Common
Language Infrastructure (CLI) is an open specification (published under
ECMA-335 and ISO/IEC 23271) developed by Microsoft that describes the
executable code and runtime environment that form the core of the
Microsoft .NET Framework and the free and open source implementations
Mono and Portable.NET. The specification defines an environment that
allows multiple high-level languages to be used on different computer
platforms without being rewritten for specific architectures. The
Microsoft .NET Framework is a software framework that can be installed
on computers running Microsoft Windows operating systems. It includes a
large library of coded solutions to common programming problems and a
virtual machine that manages the execution of programs written
specifically for the framework.