Inside the CLR

While Chris and Rosie were at home this evening making Mushroom Stroganoff, I (Annie) popped over to Oxford to a .NET Meet-Up. If you're not of a technical bent, do please feel free to browse on...

The talk was fascinating - Chris Bacon walked us through the process of building your own .NET Runtime - in C - capable of executing .NET Languages such as C# built into IL. Why? Just for fun - and to learn a bit more about how the runtime works.

The first 50 minutes was loading the EXE file, and reading the various headers to get the program information - until finally we had a pointer to the main entry point. He then built a simple execution loop, and started adding the instructions into it that were capable of running the specific IL code. Loading on and off the stack, calling functions, etc. 

The resulting code was only capable of executing the simplest of "Hello World" applications, but it had only been 2 hours since he started - and it was obvious how you could then proceed further. 

Very impressive stuff - great to get your mind bent of an evening once in a while.