18. Understanding CIL and the Role of Dynamic Assemblies

When you are building a full-scale .NET application, you will most certainly use C# (or a similar managed language such as Visual Basic), given its inherent productivity and ease of use. However, as you learned in the first chapter, the role of a managed compiler is to translate *.cs code files into terms of CIL code, type metadata, and an assembly manifest. As it turns out, CIL is a full-fledged .NET programming language, with its own syntax, semantics, and compiler (ilasm.exe).