Book excerpt: Offering authoritative, field-proven advice from a Microsoft insider, this book teaches the underlying commonalities that developers can use regardless of their language choice or development tools Extensive use of examples and working code provides developers with practical and authoritative coverage of the CLR (common language runtime) and APIs, the building blocks that make it possible to write in any choice of language Primary topics discussed include generics, MSIL (Microsoft Intermediate Language)-based framework libraries, advanced framework libraries, distributed development foundations, and more Version 2.0 is the version that provides the foundation for Visual Studio 2005