Standard Libraries (CLI)

The Standard Libraries are a set of 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 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.

[8] It defines types in the following namespaces: 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.

[13] The Extended Numerics Library provides support for floating-point (System.Single, System.Double) and extended-precision (System.Decimal) data types.

[4] The Vararg Library provides support for dealing with variable-length argument lists.