What is .NET?

CyberBry writes "There's a great technical overview of Microsoft .NET over at arstechnica: "In a remarkable feat of journalistic sleight-of-hand, thousands of column inches in many "reputable" on-line publications have talked at length about .NET whilst remaining largely ignorant of its nature, purpose, and implementation. Ask what .NET is, and you'll receive a wide range of answers, few of them accurate, all of them conflicting. Confusion amongst the press is rampant. The more common claims made of .NET are that it's a Java rip-off, or that it's subscription software. The truth is somewhat different.""

Comments

They've released the dev stuff.

[ratajik]

I haven't seen this mentioned here yet, but they actually released the dev stuff for .NET. Article here

Books, VS.NET, .NET FreeBSD

[XBL]

There are some good .NET development books coming out now. Even O'Reilly has had one out for a while (which I have), so the publishing companies seem to be eager to sell .NET.

Right now I am downloading the seven CD Visual Studio.NET Enterprise final version (yep, already warezed), a $2500 program. It even has a version of Visio bundled for doing application modeling, and that somehow automatically starts producing code, from what I understand. This is going to be interesting to try.

I have had the VS.NET Beta 2 for a few months, and it's generally easy to use, but very slow. I mean, a general "Hello World" application takes several seconds to compile, and also at least 3 seconds to execute! I have done the same thing using the raw .NET framwork development tools, and it seemed much faster (probably because my hand-written code was much smaller).

Microsoft is developing a version of the .NET runtime and classes for FreeBSD. I have talked with the lead engineer of this project over e-mail, and he said that it's due to be out in late Spring. I asked him about the Windows Forms stuff, and he said it will be based on Tk (could someone explain the implications of this?). He also said that there are going to be very few UNIX-specific classes, but they hope people will develop those on their own.

Re:Article is inaccurate.

[DrPizza]

Read the first part of the article more closely. I acknowledge that there's more than just the Framework. But I haven't covered them in this article, as it's long enough already. This is what I meant when I said:

.NET is also the collective name given to various bits of software built upon the .NET platform. These will be both products (Visual Studio.NET and Windows.NET Server, for instance) and services (like Passport, HailStorm, and so on).

A follow-up will talk about such things as, VS.NET, Passport, Hailstorm, and so on. I feel that there are broadly two parts -- the framework itself (your first bullet point), and things that use it or manipulate it (your second, third, fourth, and fifth bullet points). I realize I glossed over them, but I will talk about them at a later date.

Re:Why I won't be developing with .NET: $$$

[overturf]

> Anyone who wants to develop for .NET needs to shell out at least $1,079 for Visual Studio

Or... you can go out to MSDN and download the .Net Framework Software Development Kit for free (*connection charges apply) at this link

From the description:
The Microsoft® .NET Framework Software Development Kit (SDK) includes the .NET Framework, as well as everything you need to write, build, test, and deploy .NET Framework applications--documentation, samples, and command-line tools and compilers.