An Introduction to .NET Framework
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The .NET Framework is a Microsoft's development platform.
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It offers to develop software applications.
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It was released by Microsoft Corporation in 2002. Later on, several improvements take
place in .NET Framework, which makes it as much strong, advanced and more efficient
platform for building different kinds of software applications.
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Why it is called as “platform” is, it acts as platform for multiple languages, tools and
libraries.
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It offers visually stunning user experiences, which is mostly required today’s competitive
programming world.
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It offers much advanced security features never before.
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Supports dozens of languages like C#, VB.NET, VC++.NET, COBOL, Pascal, Python etc.
Features of .NET Framework
 Next Generation User Experiences:
.NET offers a Framework for building applications and high-fidelity
experiences in Windows that blend together application UI, documents, and media
content, while exploiting the full power of the computer. WPF (Windows Presentation
Foundation) offers developers support for 2D and 3D graphics, hardware accelerated
effects, scalability to different form factors, interactive data visualization, and
superior content readability.

Seamless and Secured Environment:
Application security is a big deal these days; perhaps the most closely
examined feature of any new application. .NET offers its best secured environment at
run time. So that it is highly impossible to access the .NET application and its related
data by the un-authorized users / hackers.
The assembly (the compiled code of .NET framework) contains the
security information like which categories of users or who can access the class or
method. So that we can say that .NET Framework applications are much secured.
The security can be improved in the ASP.NET Web Sites by Security
models like Integrated Windows Authentication, Microsoft Passport Authentication,
Forms Authentication, and Client Certificate authentication.

Multi Language Support:
.NET provides a multi-language development platform, so you can work
in the programming language you prefer. The Common Language Runtime (A part of
.NET Framework) provides support for 3 Microsoft developed languages and several
other languages from other vendors.
Languages Supported by .NET Framework
Languages from
Microsoft
Languages
vendors
from
other
Visual C#.NET
Visual Basic.NET
Visual C++.NET
APL,
Cobol,
Perl,
Pascal,
Component Pascal,
Curriculum,
Eiffel,
Forth,
Fortran,
Haskell,
J#,
Mercury,
Mondrian,
Oberon,
Python,
IronPython,
RPG,
Scheme,
Small Talk,
Standard ML

Flexible Data Access:
.NET Framework supports flexible accessibility of database data with
ADO.NET (ActiveX Data Objects .NET). ADO.NET is a set of classes that expose data
access services to the .NET programmer. ADO.NET provides a rich set of components
for creating distributed, data-sharing applications. It is an integral part of the .NET
Framework, providing access to relational, XML, and application data.
Modules of .NET
1. C#.NET (C Sharp.NET) –(Language)
 It is highly used .NET programming
language, used by most of the .NET
programmers.
 It borrows some programming features from “C” and some other
programming features from “C++”. In addition to these, it borrows few of
the good features of java language.
 It is the object oriented programming language.
2. VB.NET (Visual Basic.NET) –(Language)
 It is the Microsoft’s recommended
language for beginners of windows
programming.
 But in fact, it is used in very few of the projects in the real-time development
world, because most of the programmers usually comes with “C” and “C++”
background; hence they feel comfortable with “C#”.
 It borrows some programming features from VB (Visual Basic) language.
 It is the object oriented programming language.
3. ASP.NET (Active Server Pages.NET) – (Web Technology)
 It is the Microsoft’s web technology.
 It is used for web sites development.
 It offers much attractive and user friendly user interfaces in the server side
applications.
 It is the new version to another Microsoft’s technology called ASP (Active
Server Pages), which is a famous web technology before introducing
ASP.NET.
 It requires HTML for web page designing.
 It requires a .NET language (like C#, VB.NET, VC++.NET etc.) for server
side logic implementation.
4. ADO.NET (ActiveX Data Objects.NET) – (Database Technology)
It is the Microsoft’s database technology.
 It offers necessary programming libraries to access
the local / server databases.
 It is the new version to another Microsoft’s
technology called ADO (ActiveX Data Objects),
which is a famous database technology, used with
VB, VC++ and ASP languages.
 It requires a .NET language (like C#, VB.NET, VC++.NET etc.) for logic
implementation.