We are inundated with acronyms today. From government agencies to the latest format for high-definition video discs, everyone seems to be speaking and writing in the new shorthand.
.NET (called simply “dot net”) is one of these new, relatively speaking, acronyms. It is a platform or framework conceived and built by Microsoft. It runs on the more recent versions of Microsoft’s operating systems (such as Microsoft XP or Windows Server 2003).
To understand .NET, it may be helpful to think of a .NET application in terms of layers, starting at the bottom:
- An operating system such as Windows XP or Windows Server 2003.
- The .NET framework, which runs on/with the operating system.
- The actual application (such as MS Outlook).
Using a framework such as .NET allows us to have much more flexibility in the way that users access and combine information from a variety of sources, since the framework has built-in functionality to support connections to different databases and web services. In addition, working with .NET allows us to simplify both the initial code development as well as the long-term maintenance.
.NET applications may be developed using
many different languages, though a large percentage of the development is done using
C# and
VB. Here at Omnitech, we use these two languages for all of our .NET development projects.
The current .NET framework is version 3.5, which includes the latest ASP.NET AJAX functionality. However, we are currently maintaining or doing development in all the main versions of the platform (1.1, 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5).
In the last few months, we have used .NET for a number of different websites (such as e-commerce and memberships websites) as well as for applications which are used to manage sales contacts, inventory or to set up and manage training classes for a variety of our clients.