.NET Native is an ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation process—it turns your managed .NET code into native machine code at compile time. In contrast, traditional .NET uses just-in-time (JIT) compilation, which defers the native compilation of a method until its first execution at run time. .NET Native is more similar to a C++ compiler. In fact, it uses the Visual Studio C++ compiler as part of its tool chain. Every managed (C# or Visual Basic) Universal Windows app will utilize this new technology. The applications are automatically compiled to native code before they reach consumer devices. If you’d like to dive deeper into how it works, I highly recommend reading the MSDN Library article, “Compiling Apps with .NET Native,” at bit.ly/1QcTGxm.