According to product literature, from a business perspective, there are three phases of the Internet. The first stage goes back to early 1990, when Internet first came into general use and which brought a great revolution for businesses. In the first phase of Internet business designed and launched its Web site and focused on the number of visits to see how many customers were visiting your site and are interested in their products, etc. The second phase is what we're on the right now and at this stage companies are generating revenue through online transactions. We are now entering a third phase of the Internet, where profit is the main priority. The focus here is that companies communicate effectively with customers and partners who are geographically isolated, participate in the Digital Economy and offer a wide range of services. How can that be possible? The answer, with .NET.
What is Microsoft.NET ?
Microsoft.NET is a platform that allows us to create rich applications, which allows users to interact with the Internet through a variety of smart devices (tablet devices, Pocket PC, Web, Mobile etc.), which allows to build and integrate Web Services and which comes with many rich set of tools like Visual Studio to fully develop and build those applications.
.NET Framework
The .NET Framework is a managed, type-safe environment for developing and executing applications. The .NET Framework manages all aspects of program execution, like, allocation of memory for the storage of data and instructions, granting and denying permissions to the application, managing execution of the application and reallocation of memory for resources that are not needed.
The .NET Framework is designed for cross-language compatibility. Cross-language compatibility means, an application written in Visual Basic .NET may reference a DLL file written in C# (C-Sharp). A Visual Basic .NET class might be derived from a C# class or vice versa.
Common Language Runtime (CLR)
The CLR is described as the "execution engine" of .NET. It provides the environment within which the programs run. It's this CLR that manages the execution of programs and provides core services, such as code compilation, memory allocation, thread management, and garbage collection. Through the Common Type System (CTS), it enforces strict type safety, and it ensures that the code is executed in a safe environment by enforcing code access security. The software version of .NET is actually the CLR version.
Class Libraries
Class library is the second major entity of the .NET Framework which is designed to integrate with the common language runtime. This library gives the program access to runtime environment. The class library consists of lots of prewritten code that all the applications created in VB .NET and Visual Studio .NET will use. The code for all the elements like forms, controls and the rest in VB .NET applications actually comes from the class library.
Common Language Specification (CLS)
If we want the code which we write in a language to be used by programs in other languages then it should adhere to the Common Language Specification (CLS). The CLS describes a set of features that different languages have in common. The CLS defines the minimum standards that .NET language compilers must conform to, and ensures that any source code compiled by a .NET compiler can interpret with the .NET Framework.
ASP.NET
ASP.NET is a web application framework. It is developed by Microsoft to allow programmers to build dynamic and interactive web sites, web applications and web services. It was first released in January 2002 with version 1.0 of the .NET Framework, and is the successor to Microsoft's Active Server Pages (ASP) technology. ASP.NET is built on the Common Language Runtime (CLR), allowing programmers to write ASP.NET code using any supported .NET language.
C#.NET
C# language is intended to be a simple, modern, general-purpose, object-oriented programming language. The language is intended for use in developing software components suitable for deployment in distributed environments. C# is intended to be suitable for writing applications for both hosted and embedded systems.
Microsoft SQL Server
Microsoft SQL Server is a relational model database server produced by Microsoft. Its primary query languages are T-SQL and ANSI SQL. SQL Server is available in various versions.
HTML
HTML, which stands for Hyper Text Markup Language, is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML is the basic building-blocks of web pages. A markup language is a set of markup tags, and HTML uses markup tags to describe web pages.
JavaScript
JavaScript is the scripting language of the Web. JavaScript is used in millions of Web pages to add functionality, validate forms, detect browsers, and much more.
XML
XML stands for EXtensible Markup Language. XML is a markup language much like HTML. XML was designed to carry data, not to display data. XML tags are not predefined. You must define your own tags. XML is designed to be self-descriptive.
AJAX
Asynchronous JavaScript and XML is a group of interrelated web development methods used on the client-side to create interactive web applications. With Ajax, web applications can retrieve data from the server asynchronously in the background without interfering with the display and behavior of the existing page. Data is usually retrieved using the XMLHttpRequest object.
Silverlight
Microsoft Silverlight is an application framework for writing and running rich Internet applications with emphasis on multimedia, animations, and graphics, with features and purposes similar to those of Adobe Flash. The run-time environment for Silverlight is available as a plug-in for most web browsers. While early versions of Silverlight focused on streaming media, current versions support multimedia, graphics and animation, and give developers support for CLI languages and development tools.
LINQ
.NET Language-Integrated Query (LINQ) defines a set of general purpose standard query operators that allow traversal, filter, and projection operations to be expressed in a direct yet declarative way in any .NET-based programming language.
The Microsoft.NET Framework was introduced with a vision to create globally distributed software with Internet functionality and interoperability. The .NET Framework consists of many class libraries, includes multiple language support and a common execution platform. It's a very flexible foundation on which many different types of top class applications can be developed that do different things. Developing Internet applications with the .NET Framework is very easy.