If you are a .NET developer you know about the CLR. That big runtime that hosts our code and manages many of the features we take for granted in .NET. Improvements to the CLR will benefit any .NET application irregardless which language it was written. I'm sitting in Kit George's CLR session here at the Authors Summit. Kit is a program manager on the Base Class Libraries team.
Wow. You are going to like what they've done. I checked whether his talk is under NDA and it's not - so let me talk about some of the changes in the 2.0 CLR.
Console Applications
Ahhh, the humble console application. Boring yet simple they certainly have a place in you toolbox. But what more can you do with them? Turns out there are a number of things.
Color: Full support for foreColor of text on the console screen
Console.ForegroundColor = ConsoleColor.Red
WindowSize: Change the size of the console window
Console.WindowSize=
WindowPosition: Move the console windows to new location and the content of the window.
SecureString
The string that you use in your console app is not very secure. The CLR adds the SecureString type. The contents of the SecureString are encrypted. Plus the memory location will be 'zeroed out' when the string is dereferenced. In other words if look in memory dump you will see either gibberish or zeros.
Hosting the CLR
Starting with .NET 2.0 other applications will be able to host their own copy of the CLR. The most celebrated application to host the CLR is SQL Server 2005. There are others too. Would you believe IBM's database DB2?
If you want a really comprehensive overview of Hosting The CLR you should read CBrumme Blog
The good news for SQL Server is that I can write managed Stored Procedures, Triggers and datatypes. I can create a managed assembly and invoke methods from it from via standard SQL.
Select Name from Supplier WHERE Location::Distance (@point <3)
In this example Distance is a class and Location is a class member.
Use .NET functions from SQL- for example the String.Split () function is a lot easier to use then the forty line equivalent in T-SQL
More later
It's time for dinner. I'll post more later.