Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

David M Kean

Mircea Trofin

Krzysztof J Cwalina

Jobst-Immo Landwerth

Wes Haggard

Jan Kotas

Kumar Gaurav Khanna

Zhanliang Chen

Richard E Lander

Matthew Cohn

Gaye Oncul Kok

Michael Rayhelson

Eric N St John

Alok Shriram

Michael Rousos

Weitao Su

Mohammad Rahim Bhojani

Divya Swarnkar

Michael J Rayhelson

The subject disclosure relates to enabling the evolution of a framework by providing public surface area factorings for both old and new public surface areas. The factoring can mitigate changes in the implementation of existing distributions of framework. The factoring can also mitigate breaking existing binaries. Further, the factoring can be provided while mitigating a degradation in the security guarantees of the linking model. The factorings can be applied for runtime and/or for a development toolkit. Thus, multiple, almost simultaneous, interoperable views of a framework implementation can be enabled at runtime and/or at design or build time. The views can represent different versions of the framework.

Mechanism for compatibility and preserving framework refactoring

Shared libraries and references within the shared libraries can be retargeted in accordance with optional transformation rules. The optional transformation rules can be applied differently for different binding contexts. For user-code scenarios, optional retargeting binding rules can be applied automatically by default without requiring any human intervention. Optional targeting that triggers automatic binding behaviors can be disabled based on heuristics. Alternatively, the user can specify in the code or in a configuration file if the source or target is to be loaded. Transformation rules can be disabled based on heuristics. A manual option permits a user to choose at runtime whether the transformation is to be applied, or not applied, in a late-bound fashion.

Optional retargeting of library references

An enhanced binder provides flexibility and certainty when selecting a version of a software library to load, and an enhanced loader prevents a library version vulnerable to a security flaw from being loaded. The binder can perform unification, implicit override, and/or redirection. Implicit override searches assembly-specific locations for an implicit_version, and override the previously chosen unification or other version with the implicit_version when the implicit_version is greater. The implicit_version gets updated with the individual assembly, whereas the unification_version gets updated with the framework. Redirection may override the implicit_version. Unlike redirection, an implicit_version does not recite an explicit range and is found outside application configuration files. The implicit_version is specified implicitly by the assembly without an XML declaration. Vulnerable libraries are not loaded, based on out-of-band metadata placed in response to a list of known out-of-band assemblies, an out-of-band-servicing attribute, or a custom servicing library.

Out-of-band framework libraries within applications

Different views on an object that has metadata. For instance, one code segment might have one view of the object and be able to view some of the metadata of that object, while another code segment might have a different view of the object and have a view on a different set of the metadata of that object. This may be done even though the code segments reside in the same application. Thus, each code segment may have a view of the metadata on the object that is most useful for that code segment to use the object without getting confused by metadata that is less or not relevant to the manner in which the code segment is to use the object.

Reflection over objects

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Redmond, WA, United States of America

David M Kean