How did Microsoft create assemblies that have circular references?

Posted by Drew Noakes on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Drew Noakes
Published on 2009-08-22T17:26:06Z Indexed on 2010/03/21 6:31 UTC
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Filed under:

.NET

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circular-references

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base-class-library

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bcl

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assemblies

In the .NET BCL there are circular references between:

System.dll and System.Xml.dll
System.dll and System.Configuration.dll
System.Xml.dll and System.Configuration.dll

Here's a screenshot from .NET Reflector that shows what I mean:

How Microsoft created these assemblies is a mystery to me. Is a special compilation process required to allow this? I imagine something interesting is going on here.

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