What is .NET?

.NET (dot NET) is one of the words heard too often these days connected to the computer arena. What exactly is it? I will try to answer the above question in a simple and a meaningful way. While talking about the difference between C and C++ I have heard many people saying – ‘The difference is that C uses printf and C++ uses cout�. This is not the difference. Likewise, there is a fallacy that .NET is Microsoft way of implementing Java. This is not the case. While .NET is providing all the features provided by Java, it does provide something extra. Sure, .NET should have been inspired by the phenomenal success of Java.

The .NET framework provides the following:

1. It provides a new way to access the Windows core functions. Traditionally this was done with C/C++. Visual Basic (before the introduction of .NET) used a different method to access the windows core API (Application Program Interface). So the type of access depends on the platform you are using. C/C++, VB, Delphi all had its own way of doing it. This is where .NET comes in. It provides a uniform way of accessing the operations provided by Windows, whatever be the programming language you are using. This portion of .NET is commonly referred to as the .NET Framework class library.

2. .NET provides a new infrastructure for application management. It provides numerous features for the same purpose – code-level security, cross language class level inheritance, cross language type compatibility, hardware and platform level independence etc. Microsoft developed a new way of implementing all these – The Common Language Runtime (CLR). The CLR includes the Common Type System (CTS) for cross-language type compatibility and the Common Language Specification (CLS) for ensuring that third-party libraries can be used from all .NET-enabled languages. Hardware and software independence is achieved by using Microsoft Intermediate Language (MSIL or just IL). It is similar to Java bytecode; all the .NET programs are compiled into IL. IL programs are converted into native machine language at runtime (JIT compiling). IL is never interpreted.

3.Greater Support for Web: The classic Active Server Pages (ASP), has been replaced by ASP.NET. While classic ASP was an interpreted one, the .NET version is a compiled one like mentioned above. This increases the execution speed greatly. In addition, the .NET developer can access all the .NET objects supported in web pages, compared to the six objects available for the classic ASP developer.

4. A new focus on distributed-application architecture. Visual Studio .NET provides top-notch tools for creating and consuming web services -- vendor- independent software services that can be invoked over the Internet.