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.NET Framework

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The .NET (note capitalization) initiative is a Microsoft project to create a new software development platform focused on network transparency, platform independence, and rapid application development.

The strategy

.NET is Microsoft's strategic initiative for server and desktop development for the next decade. According to Microsoft, .NET includes many technologies that are designed to facilitate rapid development of Internet applications.

Enterprise infrastructure

Second, .NET is a software platform, which was released in 2002. It presents a platform-independent target for software development, with many built-in features including Internet integration and features intended to enhance security. It relies fully on software componentry and the component-oriented programming paradigm. In this respect it largely replaces the former component object model (COM).

Supporting products

Third, .NET is a collection of development tools specifically developed for use with the .NET platform. The principal example being Visual Studio, an integrated development environment provided by Microsoft.

.NET languages

The CLI is designed to provide support for any object-oriented programming language, sharing a common object model and a large common class library.

Microsoft and other vendors provide .NET versions of many languages, including:

Built-in languages:

Some available third-party languages:

Notes:

  • many of these compilers are free (the vendors sell IDEs).
  • most languages have significant adjustments to fit into the .NET Framework. The vendors have often used this as an excuse to vary other features of the languages at the same time.

ASP.NET, an update to the classic Active Server Pages (ASP) web programming language, implements .NET and has a .NET class library, but is not itself a language as it may be written in any .NET language.

ADO.NET is a new version of ADO (ActiveX Data Objects) for the .NET framework.

.NET vs. J2EE

The CLI, the CIL and C# have similarities to Sun Microsystems' Java Virtual Machine and Sun's Java, hence they are fierce competitors. Both use their own intermediate bytecode. .NET bytecode is designed for just-in-time compilation (JITting), while Java bytecode originally was designed to be interpreted, not JITted. .NET is currently only fully available on Windows platforms, whereas Java is available on many platforms. (However, see below for alternative implementations such as Mono or Rotor.) Sun's product, J2EE, provides equivalent functionality to other Microsoft technologies such as COM+ (previously MTS) and MSMQ which are tightly integrated into the Windows operating system. .NET components make full use of these existing technologies in an abstracted manner.

More cooperation is possible with the software "IKVM".

.NET vs. COM

The previous software component technology endorsed by Microsoft for large-scale software systems was the Component object model or COM, using COM+ or MTS enhancements for distributed transactional components. While .NET may wrap COM-objects and vice versa, it has been clearly stated by Microsoft that .NET will eventually replace COM as a software component architecture. New applications addressing the Win32 platform should not use COM, but .NET, with use of existing services via abstracted interfaces (e.g. transactional .Net components currently use COM+).

Standardization

Microsoft has submitted a part of the specifications of .NET to ECMA and ISO for standardization. This is a calculated risk, but it may encourage standards-compliant implementations, to provide an ongoing bridge for non-Windows software to be converted to Microsoft .NET.

Alternative implementations

While the Microsoft .NET Framework is the flagship implementation of .NET technologies, there exist other implementations.

Mono is an open source implementation of the .NET runtime and development libraries. Mono is being developed by Ximian (a part of Novell, Inc.) and the open source software development community. It is quickly maturing, including support for ASP.NET, ADO.NET, and evolving support for Windows Forms libraries. Mono also includes the development of new libraries and technologies, which include:

  • Gtk#: A .NET wrapper for the Gtk+ GUI toolkit.
  • XSP: A web server written in C# with support for hosting ASP.NET applications.
  • MonoDevelop: A port of SharpDevelop, a GPLed IDE for .NET, to Gtk# and Mono.
  • Novell.Directory.Ldap class libraries: A free implementation of Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) for .NET.

DotGNU Portable.NET is less mature than Mono due to the fact that Portable.NET was not written initially using Microsoft's development framework.

Microsoft Rotor, or the Shared Source Common Language Infrastructure is a shared source implementation of the .NET Framework by Microsoft. It runs on Microsoft Windows XP, FreeBSD, and Mac OS X 10.2.

History

The technologies used in .NET were originally developed by Microsoft as their version of Java. When Microsoft decided to end their future use of Sun's Java technologies in 1998 the existing Microsoft J++ (Java) product transformed into the beginnings of the .NET project.

In Internet nomenclature, .net is a Top-level domain, or TLD, as is .com.

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