Many developers tend to look at Windows 8 as a completely new platform and even question whether it heralded the imminent demise of managed code. After spending many months digging into the Windows Runtime (WinRT), Metro style or “tailored” applications, and exploring how they related to the .NET Framework, I’ve come to the conclusion that the two work very closely together and in fact are engineered to integrate. That means good news for managed developers. The .NET Framework 4.5 is very much “Metro-aware” while the Windows Runtime knows how to shake hands with the CLR. The purpose of this post is to elaborate on this a bit more than what I covered in my Portable Class Library series.
METADATA
The first thing to note is that WinRT components, regardless of what language they were written in, share the same metadata format as .NET Framework assemblies. This is what allows you to navigate to the metadata folder at c:\windows\system32\WinMetadata and be able to use ildasm.exe to expose the definitions of WinRT components that are part of the Windows 8 operating system. The standard is documented as ECMA-335 and you can check this link to learn more.
As part of this metadata, types and assemblies can be tagged with a new Intermediate Language (IL) keyword called windowsruntime. This keyword tags the type as a WinRT component. The .NET Framework uses this to know when to marshal parameters because the WinRT type system is not the same as the one supported by the CLR. Fortunately, this is supported “under the covers” as you’ll see in the next section. When an assembly is tagged with the keyword, it instructs the .NET Framework to use a special APIs like the one called RoResolveNamespace to load references. This is a way that all supported WinRT languages can access underlying components.
TYPE CONVERSION
As I mentioned, the .NET Framework does some magic with type conversion. This happens in both directions (calls into and values received from WinRT components). This is not new – this has been supported for awhile and you can see a list of Default Marshaling for Value Types in the MSDN documentation. A System.Int32 becomes a ELEMENT_TYPE_I4 and vice versa. These are what are referred to as “fundamental types.”
In addition, however, the CLR performs implicit mapping to more complex types. If you’ve been doing any Windows 8 development, you are probably familiar with conversions that look like this:
Windows.Foundation.Collections.IVector<T> <= => System.Collections.Generic.IList<T>
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