What is .Net?

[csterns]

Okay maybe I was asleep for a very long time and missed this. What is .Net?

[Jacob]

http://www.microsoft.com/net/basics/whatis.asp

It's essentially a technology that MS has created - it's pretty hard to explain, maybe Microsoft's definition above will help.

[Janak Parekh]

Ironically, this description is woefully inadequate.

.NET is Microsoft's new application platform. Long-term, it's designed to help replace the horribly outdated and broken Win32 API in the Windows OS. The platform contains several things: a new replacement API, which does happen to have stellar support for XML and Web Services, a set of languages that support development in that API (while you can use C++, it doesn't leverage the full benefits), an intermediate bytecode language (called MSIL, sort of like Java bytecode), and an interpreter platform to run that bytecode. These four things are bundled together into a product called the ".NET Framework".

By running in this interpreted environment, .NET applications are designed to be type-safe and free of all the problems that plague current C++ software (like buffer overflows). Moreover, things like versioning are natively supported, which will long-term end DLL conflicts; and finally, MS is trying to make the API similar between different scale implementations; the .NET Compact Framework, which is for handheld devices like WinCE units, is a pretty clean subset of the regular .NET Framework.

Sadly, the .NET moniker was tremendously diluted. WinCE .NET happens to have or support the .NET Compact Framework, but that's about all the .NET it is -- this is why they renamed Windows .NET Server to Windows Server 2003.

Does that make any sense?

--janak