Security

The most important facet of any distributed application development environment is how it handles security. Thankfully for those of us who have long complained that Microsoft would never be taken seriously in the server-side enterprise solutions space without a completely new approach to security, .NET brings many concepts to the table. In fact, security begins as soon as a class is loaded by the CLR because the class loader is a part of the .NET security scheme. For example, when a class is loaded in the .NET runtime, security-related factors such as accessibility rules and self-consistency requirements are verified. In addition, security checks ensure that a piece of code has the proper credentials to access certain resources. Security code ensures role determination and identity information. These security checks even span process and machine boundaries to ensure that sensitive data is not compromised in distributed computing environments.