An Introduction to .NET(Part-I)

An Introduction to .NET(Part-I):

.NET is a platform for creating several applications like desktop, distributed, web applications, etc. The main adavntage of .NET is that support for writing an application in different languages like(C#, VB,J#,etc) and it is also an platform independent means it is like Java and can run on any OS.....

For more on this visit the following links

http://www.mono-project.com/Main_Page

http://www.gnu.org/software/dotgnu/

.NET Framework Architecture:

.NET Languages: you can select any one of the languages you desire for developing the applications like(C#, VB.NET, J# or any other).

.NET Common Language System(CLS): It is the component which enables language interoperability. Common Type System(CTS) is a sub-component of CLS. So to make langauge interoperability, it should adhere to the specification of CLS.

.NET Framework Class Library(FCL) (.NET Base class Library): This is the library which contains objects that enable you to communicate with the system. For eg, to perform i/o with the harddisk, you include the library(System.IO). FCL is the library which is used by all the languages.

.NET CLR: This is the runtime environment for your .net applications. It takes care of executing your application and providing services behind the scenes like multi-threading, garbage collection, security, etc.

Applications developed using .NET:

Web Applications: ASP.NET is used to create web applications. It provides you a lot of predefined tools using which you can create a quick and robust applications. You can choose any one language(C#, VB, JScript,..) for the server-side scripting.

Windows Applications: You can use any one of the languages provided. These type of applications are desktop applications which is used by a single computer or user. This applications may further be classified as Console Application, GUI application.

Distributed Applications: Web Services, .NET remoting can be used to create these type of applications. But allpications created using .NET remoting cannot communicate with non-.net applications, Web Services on the other hand communicate with heterogeneous systems(other than .NET applications). Web services achieves this by using SOAP message protocol which uses XML for defining the messages. XML(eXtensible Markup Language) which is platform and language independent stores data in a plain text format rather than using any internal representation.

Hope this is useful for an beginner, and we will see more about it in the next section.