Common Type System (CTS) in .NET

CTS

The Common Type System (CTS) standardizes the data types of all programming languages using .NET under the umbrella of .NET to a common data type for easy and smooth communication among these .NET languages.

How CTS converts the data type to a common data type

To implement or see how CTS is converting the data type to a common data type, for example, when we declare an int type data type in C# and VB.Net then they are converted to int32. In other words, now both will have a common data type that provides flexible communication between these two languages.



Let's take a live example using a Double data type and we will see how .NET helps to make the data types of C# and VB.NET common to each other for easy communication.

Live Example

We will create a new Visual Basic (Console Application) project.



Now we will add one more project of Visual C# (Console Application).



Now to see how CTS is helping with the data types of the programming languages and providing a common environment we will declare a Double data type (*note you can user other variables for your reference) variable in both the C# program.cs and Module1.vb.

C# Data type Declaration



Visual Basic Data type Declaration



Now start debugging both of these Console Applications. Once you are done with Debugging the application, we will now use an important tool provided with Visual Studio Called “ILDASM”.

You can learn about “ILDASM” by Control + Click on the “ILDASM” link and gain information on how ILDASM is helpful. So returning back to CTS, now open “ILDASM” from the Visual Studio x64 Command Prompt (2010).



After execution of the command, the “ILDASM” window will open as in the following:



So now to check how CTS converts the data type of C# and VB.Net to be common to each other we will open two “ILDASM” programs then click on File then open the exe file of the desired application. Here we have created VBCONSOLE and C#, so now we will open the .exe in “ILDASM”.



Now once we have opened both of the Console Applications the “ILDASM” window will appear as in the following snapshot.



Click on Visual Basic and then on VisualBasic.Module1, you can see there is a void main function as shown below.



Click on Main : void()



You will find that the Double variable is converted to float64 and the same in case of the C# Console Application the Double variable is converted to float64.

CTS converting data type to Common type for both programming languages



Hence we can clearly see how the .NET Framework is converting the data type to a Common Type System, so it is a flexible communication among languages that are compliant with .NET Framework. I hope this article was helpful and it is easy to understand the concept of CTS and how using “ILDASM” we figured that the Common type System helps to bring the data types of all programming languages to a common type.