MSDN Magazine: CLR Inside Out - New Features and Improved Performance in Silverlight 4. One of the biggest changes in Silverlight 4 was moving to a new version of the CLR for the core execution engine.
Every release of the .NET Framework has used the same CLR as its core, from the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 through the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1. The .NET Framework 4 made some changes—even some very large changes, such as factoring out the easy-to-download Client Profile and decreasing startup time by optimizing layout of native binaries—but we’ve always been restricted by the high compatibility bar imposed by being an in-place update. With the .NET Framework 4 release, we were able to make major changes to the CLR itself, while still remaining highly compatible with previous versions.
Silverlight 4 uses the new CLR as the basis for its CoreCLR and brings all of its improvements from the desktop to the Web. Let’s start with a little background on how the CoreCLR GC works. Sharing Silverlight Assemblies with .NET Apps - CLR Team Blog. At the recent PDC, Scott Guthrie announced in his Silverlight 4 keynote that we had implemented a new feature, to enable developers to share certain assemblies between Silverlight and .NET.
There are many differences between Silverlight and full .NET including WPF, and this new feature doesn’t solve those differences – in those cases, you’ll still need to compile your code twice. But in some cases, developers will write code that only uses features whose behavior is identical between Silverlight and full .NET, and in those cases, we want to enable that code to be shared. This post provides more detail on that sharing, and explains how developers can target it, and what the restrictions are.
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