What is Microsoft .NET? - An Introduction to .NET

I hope most of the members are aware of .NET. But I am writing this article to the newbies to .NET.

Dot-NET consists of a number of technologies that allow software developers to build Internet-based distributed systems. Individual pieces of these systems, called software components, can be built using several different programming languages and by several different organizations. Through a common set of core functionality, Dot-NET allows these components to work reliably with each other.

Microsoft's core implementation of Dot-NET includes:

* C# (a new programming language)
* the Common Language Runtime (for support of other programming languages)
* a collection of components that provide support for networking, security, and other "base" services commonly needed in distributed applications
* Windows Forms (WinForms) and Web Forms, rich Windows user interface components
* ASP.NET, a new version of Active Server Pages
* ADO.NET, new data access objects in the tradition of the original Active Data Objects

A new version of Microsoft's system development environment, Visual Studio .NET, is the primary tool used to build dot-NET software.

Dot-NET in Practice

Underlying all of dot-NET are two key technologies, HTTP and XML. Dot-NET builds higher-level tools on top of this foundation to make development of distributed systems for the Internet easier.

Microsoft envisions dot-NET will be used extensively in the area of ecommerce. Businesses can implement the content of their online services in XML and deliver these services to customers and business partners through XML-based messaging standards like the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP).


Hope this article would be useful to the new members to .NET technology.

Raghav