Provides a general description of the .NET Catalog Component.
Microsoft® .NET enables a software integration through the use Web services. Microsoft Visual Studio® .NET and the Microsoft .NET Framework allow developers to develop XML Web services and integrate them easily with other applications.
Assemblies are the building blocks of .NET Framework applications. An assembly is a collection of types and resources that are built to work together and form a logical unit of functionality. An assembly provides the common language runtime with the information it needs to be aware of type implementations. To the runtime, a type does not exist outside the context of an assembly.
If you plan on calling an external application that exposes itself using .NET Assemblies, from your process or BPM Object methods, make sure you read the .NET documentation provided with that application (or contact the software vendor for further information).
.NET Bridge is a Windows application that acts as a 'bridge' between BPM applications and .NET Assemblies. AquaLogic BPM supplies this application to provide all the necessary services to introspect and use .NET components.
The .NET bridge runs as a standalone process. Is itself a .NET application, so it runs in the CLI (the CLI is managed automatically by Windows).
All components called by the bridge, share the same CLI than the bridge itself since they are called using System.Reflection APIs (it follows that they share the same process).
Before using .NET Assemblies from processes or BPM Objects, they should be cataloged into the project's catalog. When you catalog a .NET assembly, you are gathering all the necessary information that Studio needs in order to call and execute it at runtime. This information is also used by Studio to detect potential errors at compile time, which dramatically reduces the time spent in fixing errors in a process.