Fundamentals
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The common type system defines how types are declared, used, and managed in the common language runtime, and is also an important part of the runtime's support for cross-language integration.
It is designed as a singly rooted object hierarchy with System.Object as the base type from which all other types are derived.
All types in .NET are either value types or reference types.
Value Types: Contain the values that need to be stored directly on the stack or allocated inline in a structure. They can be built-in (standard primitive types), user-defined (defined in source code) or enumerations (sets of enumerated values that are represented by labels but stored as a numeric type).
Value types are data types whose objects are represented by the object's actual value. If an instance of a value type is assigned to a variable, that variable is given a fresh copy of the value.
Reference Types: Store a reference to the value‘s memory address and are allocated on the heap. Reference types can be any of the pointer types, interface types, or self-describing types (arrays and class types such as user-defined classes, boxed value types, and delegates).
Reference types are data types whose objects are represented by a reference (similar to a pointer) to the object's actual value. If a reference type is assigned to a variable, that variable references (points to) the original value. No copy is made.
The common language specification defines a set of features that are needed by many common applications.
CLS is a subset of the CTS. This means that all of the rules in the CTS also apply to the CLS, unless the CLS rules are more strict.