Touted as the next revolution not only for the company that was responsible for creating it but also for the Internet, the .Net framework consists of a suite of products, whose various features will be meshed with the vast capabilities of the Internet. Thus, it successfully breaks the barriers of the varying needs of different devices, so that information can be accessed from any desktop, laptop, cell phone and PDA, formatted to make sense irrespective of the nature of the device being used for the purpose. All this will be made possible by another service which manages a user's identity and data and make it available to the user from a range of devices.
The whole concept of .Net can be thought of as a service where you pay for the service much like how you currently do for cable TV, rather than as software installed from a CD. The key to making all this possible is the eXtensible Markup Language (XML). The .Net framework provides a development and execution environment for building and running Web services using technologies such as Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and eXtensible Markup Language (XML). SOAP is an interoperability protocol that uses XML to link together applications and services across the Internet.
The whole concept of .Net at present can be defined in one word - confusing. There is a lot of jargon being bandied about which talk of the user experience, user environments, programming infrastructure, developer experience and so on, sufficient to muddle your already confused mind. Here, we have attempted to offer an overview of the .Net framework.
The .NET framework
Enterprise Servers
Web services
Programming language
The borrowing from Java is not just restricted to syntax and keywords. The Common Language Runtime (CLR), the new executable environment for all Microsoft programming and scripting languages, is very similar to the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). Although it's not an interpreter like the JVM, it is similar to it in that it provides garbage collection, type validation, assignment-checking etc. The CLR plays a role in a component's development time and run-time experiences. While the component is running, the runtime is responsible for managing memory allocation, starting up and killing threads and processes and enforcing security policy. The runtime makes the developer's experience very simple, especially when compared to COM. It also has certain features such as reflection, which reduces the amount of code written by developers.
SOAP
The 1.0 release of Windows.Net that will offer the infrastructure and base for .Net services has been code named Whistler. Based on Windows2000, it will be released in late 2001 while the future version of Windows.Net, the 2.0 version codenamed Blackcomb, will be released in 2-3 years.