The Standard Libraries are a set of standard libraries included in the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) in order to encapsulate many common functions, such as file reading and writing, XML document manipulation, exception handling, application globalization, network communication, threading, and reflection, which makes the programmer's job easier. It is much larger in scope than standard libraries for most other languages, including C++, and is comparable in scope and coverage to the standard libraries of Java.
The Standard Libraries are the Base Class Library (BCL), Runtime Infrastructure Library (both part of the kernel profile), Network Library, Reflection Library, XML Library (which with the first two listed libraries form the compact profile), Extended Array Library, Parallel Library, Floating Point Library and Vararg Library.
The Framework Class Library (FCL) is the original implementation of the Standard Libraries as the .NET Framework, which includes it, is the first implementation of the CLI.
The standard libraries primarily belong to namespace System.*. Microsoft, the developers of the .NET platform, also provide official extension libraries in Microsoft.* and Microsoft.Extensions.*, though they are not part of the official .NET standard library.
The Base Class Library is a simple runtime library for modern programming languages. It serves as the Standard for the runtime library for the language C# as well as one of the CLI Standard Libraries. It provides types to represent the built-in data types of the CLI, simple file access, custom attributes, security attributes, string manipulation, formatting, streams, collections, among other things. It defines types in the following namespaces:
| Name | Description | |||||||||||||||||||||
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| System.Collections.Generic | Defines generic types of the container types in the System.Collections namespace. | |||||||||||||||||||||
| System.IO | Defines type that enable reading from and writing to different streams, such as files or other data streams. Also provides a connection to the file system. | |||||||||||||||||||||
| System.Text | Defines types that support various character encodings, regular expressions and a more efficient mechanism for manipulating strings. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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The Runtime Infrastructure Library provides the services needed by a compiler to target the CLI and the facilities needed to dynamically load types from a stream in a specified file format. It defines types in the following namespaces:
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