What does ms in mscorlib.dll stands for ?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Kapil Sachdeva
  • Start date Start date
K

Kapil Sachdeva

Hi:

I was just wondering what does 'ms' in mscorlib.dll stands for ?. It
shouldn't be 'microsoft' else it defies the purpose of platform
interoperability. Mono guys call their main assembly - 'corlib.dll'.
I do not know if Mono is giving their assembly the wrong name or 'ms' is
microsoft ?

Please clear my doubts and confusion on this.

regards & thanks
Kapil
 
I'm not 100% sure, but I don't think the ECMA standard specifies an assembly
name.
 
That's true but if you take your application from Win32 (MSFT) to Unix
(Mono) it won't
work due to existence of corlib or mscorlib.

I am looking for the write name of the main dll and ofcourse 'ms'

regards & thanks
Kapil
 
Hi,

out of the book 'Applied Microsoft .NET Framework Programming':
------------------------------------------------------------------------
When Microsoft first started working on the .NET Framework, MSCorLib.dll was
an acronym for Microsoft Common Object Runtime Library. Once ECMA started to
standardize the CLR and parts of the FCL, MSCorLib.dll officially became the
acronym for Multilanguage Standard Common Object Runtime Library. :-)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
--> out of that it is a fault of the Mono-Project. Whatever ...

It should be mentioned that mscorlib.dll is an pre-compiled assembly. So
maybe that's a reason why it doesn't work using it with Unix. There is a
tool available when you have installed .NET SDK called NGEN. With this tool
you can create your own pre-compiled assemblies. (It yould be that NGEN adds
some Microsoft specific stuff to the assembly which sould be pre-compiled
and so for example mscorlib.dll won't work in combination with Unix ... it's
just an idea and thought of mine. Maybe I'm wrong)

Cheers,
Sepp
 
Dear Hurrassignger

Thank you vey much.for this excellent explanation. It solves my confusion.

regards & thanks again
Kapil
 
Kapil said:
Hi:

I was just wondering what does 'ms' in mscorlib.dll stands for ?. It
shouldn't be 'microsoft' else it defies the purpose of platform
interoperability. Mono guys call their main assembly - 'corlib.dll'.
I do not know if Mono is giving their assembly the wrong name or 'ms' is
microsoft ?

Please clear my doubts and confusion on this.

regards & thanks
Kapil
Click to expand...

The ECMA standard defines all the types that are part of the BCL (Base
Class Library) in an XML file called "All.xml"

Most (All?) of the types in the BCL are defined to be in an assembly
named "mscorlib".

I could not find any reference in the ECMA spec as to what the name
stands for - I assume that when MS was initially designing the .NET
framework it stood for "Microsoft Core Library" and that it was
standardized with the "mscorlib" name in the ECMA spec without any
rationale given to its name (as it doesn't really matter except possibly
for political reasons).

A similar situation occurred with the "DVD" trademark. First it
officially stood for "Digital Video Disc", the "Digital Versatile Disc',
and finally "DVD" officially stands for nothing - it's just "DVD".

Note that while the assembly name is specified, the ECMA spec
specifically states (in Appendix E of Partition V) that filenames are
not not specified. In other words, assemblies are logical concepts that
can be implemented in different ways by different CLI implementations.

Browsing the online Mono documentation indicates that they specify the
assembly name as "mscorlib". Those docs also state that assembly
mscorlib is in "mscorlib.dll" (which is the filename on my Windows
install of Mono).

I'm not familiar with the Mono project on Unix (and am not very familiar
with it on Windows either), but I'd assume that even if the file
containing the (or most of the) BCL is named corlib.dll, that the
runtime should bind references to the "mscorlib" assembly to that file.

I've tried a simple console program compiled with Microsoft's C#
compiler, and ran it with the Mono runtime (on a Windows platform), and
had no trouble. I think that your concerns are nothing to worry about.
 
Back
Top