This International Standard is based on a submission from Microsoft. It describes a technology, called

C++/CLI, that is a binding between the Standard C++ programming language and the ECMA and ISO/IEC

Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) (§3). That submission was based on another Microsoft project,

Managed Extensions for C++, the first widely distributed implementation of which was released by

Microsoft in July 2000, as part of its .NET Framework initiative. The first widely distributed beta

implementation of C++/CLI was released by Microsoft in ??.

ECMA Technical Committee 39 (TC39) Task Group 5 (TG5) was formed in October 2003, to produce a

standard for C++/CLI. (Another Task Group, TG3, had been formed in September 2000, to produce a

standard for a library and execution environment called Common Language Infrastructure. An ISO/IEC

version of that CLI standard (§3) has since been adopted. CLI is based on a subset of the .NET Framework.)