Safety and Security

The .NET Runtime environment is designed to be a safe and secure environment. The .NET Runtime is a managed environment, which means that the Runtime manages memory for the programmer. Instead of having to manage memory allocation and deallocation, the garbage collector does it.
Not only does garbage collection reduce the number of things to remember when programming, in a server environment it can drastically reduce the number of memory leaks. This makes high-availability systems much easier to develop.
Additionally, the .NET Runtime is a verified environment. At runtime, the environment verifies that the executing code is type-safe. This can catch errors, such as passing the wrong type to a function, and attacks, such as trying to read beyond allocated boundaries or executing code at an arbitrary location.
The security system interacts with the verifier to ensure that code does only what it is permitted to do.
The security requirements for a specific piece of code can be expressed in a finely grained manner; code can, for example, specify that it needs to be able to write a scratch file, and that requirement will be checked during execution.