What Is Microsoft .NET?
Microsoft .NET is software that connects information, people, systems, and devices. It spans clients, servers, and developer tools, and consists of:
- The .NET Framework, used for building and running all kinds of software, including Web-based applications, smart client applications, and XML Web services—components that facilitate integration by sharing data and functionality over a network through standard, platform-independent protocols such as XML (Extensible Markup Language), SOAP, and HTTP.
- Client software, such as Windows XP, Windows CE, and Microsoft Office XP, that helps developers deliver a deep and compelling user experience across a family of devices and existing products.
What Is the .NET Framework?
The .NET Framework is an integral Windows component for building and running the next generation of software applications and Web services. The .NET Framework:
- Supports over 20 different programming languages.
- Manages much of the plumbing involved in developing software, enabling developers to focus on the core business logic code.
- Makes it easier than ever before to build, deploy, and administer secure, robust, and high-performing applications.
The .NET Framework is composed of the common language runtime and a unified set of class libraries.
Why?
How does .NET benefit software? What feature do I have as a user of a .NET program that I could not have had with a normal Win32 executable?"
We could say that there are mainly two reasons:
1) .NET is an isolated environment. Guess our programs are very badly written (they are not!) with a lot of potential harmful bugs: the worst thing they could do is to kill your .NET processes. The Operating System won't suffer any collateral damage.
2) The CLR (the .NET runtime environment) makes a "just-in-time", "on-the-fly" compilation of .NET code, making optimization based on your CPU (or CPUs) and, especially, based on the dynamic runtime data of the program usage (that means that if a special routine is invoked 1000 times, that will be "inlined" in the main code by the CLR, for instance). Of course, we could have done the same thing in C++, but we would have to release an optimized version for any CPU around (Intel Prescott, AMD 64, Intel Pentium, Intel Itanium and so on...)
3) The .NET Framework also offers significant performance and scalability benefits for enterprise application and it's a valid alternative to other middleware platforms, such as J2EE or CORBA.
For those reasons, and some others like the quality of the .NET APIs, we are strongly committed in .NET development.
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