What is .NET?

.NET is a product family, shipped by Microsoft in 2001, as a response to the successful Java from Sun. It's not a clone, but a complete redesign, with some exciting new features, like language independence, great Database support, broad XML support, well designed WebServices and WebApplications support and a big upgrade to the VisualBasic language, including object orientation. To this family they also count Services and the Microsoft Servers.

Microsoft .NET is in fact 3 things. It is important not to confuse them.

Mono is just an implementation of the .NET Framework. The .NET Framework is a "software platform", similiar to Java. The technical aspect will be discussed in "Architecture".

Language independence. Perhaps the most important factor is, that all languages "are created eval". Yes, that's the right word. There are not one or two languages, that can be consumed by others, if you want to be independent from language. (A bit wired.) Example: All Gnome APIs are written in C. This ensures, that you can write an applicaton in Python, by accessing these C libraries through bindings. But you cannot access Python programs through C. In the .NET world this is possible. Write in C#, MonoBasic, or whatever, you can without any problems reuse those classes. Great!

Platform independence. .NET code is not compiled to machine code, but has an intermediate form. You can copy binaries across platforms just like in Java. Only native code invokation can stop this, but it will disappear, when time moves.

Class library. .NET has a big, big class library, for almost any task. Especially the high-level classes are interesting. XML-Support, Database-Support, WebServices-Support and Webpages support are a few examples.

C# language. C# is a very beatiful, clean, effective language.

VB.NET language. Microsoft has finally fixed the Basic language here. It is now just as feature-full as C# or any other .NET langauge is and Basic classes can be reused in C# like C# classes in Basic.

web applications.With ASP.NET Microsoft ships the next generation web page framework. It suffers from language independence, so finally you can write your we pages with pascal or C++ as well as LOGO and so on. Also it's the first framework to break with 100% HTML code programming and makes HTML accessible as objects, while also introducing complex things like claendars.

A. Credits

Authors: Johannes Roith (johannes@jroith.de)