Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Casimir Lakshan Fernando

Abolade Gbadegesin

Yasser Elsayed Shaaban

Adina Magdalena Trufinescu

Sameer Tejani

Mei-Chin Tsai

Subramanian Ramaswamy

Ashish Babbar

Milind Mohan Chabbi

Disclosed herein are representative embodiments of tools and techniques for installing, executing, and/or updating managed applications through generation of native code from code in an intermediate language. According to one exemplary technique, a computing device receives machine dependent intermediate language code (MDIL code) generated by an online provider for an application. Additionally, the computing device installs the application on the computing device by generating a native image for the application, which includes binding a portion of the MDIL code with one or more libraries on the computing device. Also, the native image is stored on the computing device for use in loading the application for execution.

Generating native code from intermediate language code for an application

Verification of low-level rewriters such as binary rewriters involves 'vanilla' rewriting a file to generate a rewritten low-level file without performing any optimization, compaction, or other substantive low-level code transformation during the rewrite. Then the metadata of the original low-level file is automatically compared with matching metadata of the rewritten low-level file for semantic equivalence. A properly functioning rewriter produces semantically equivalent files, whereas a defective rewriter may produce files whose metadata semantics differ. Comparison may distinguish composite metadata entities from self-contained metadata entities, and transitive closures of metadata may be compared. Comparison may also test for bitwise equality of self-contained metadata entities, and test for equality between respective flags, strings, fields, and/or methods of the original and rewritten files. Syntactic variants may be detected during comparison, and metadata may be converted into a canonical form to facilitate comparison.

Low-level code rewriter verification

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Casimir Lakshan Fernando