The purpose of this book is to explain how to develop applications and reusable classes for

the .NET Framework. Specifically, this means that I intend to explain how the CLR works and

the facilities that it offers. I’ll also discuss various parts of the Framework Class Library (FCL).

No book could fully explain the FCL—it contains literally thousands of types now, and this

number continues to grow at an alarming rate. Therefore, here I’m concentrating on the core

types that every developer needs to be aware of.