Microsoft announced the .NET intitiative in July 2000. The .NET platform is a new development framework with a new programming interface to Windows services and APIs, integrating a number of technologies that emerged from Microsoft during the late 1990s. Incorporated into .NET are COM+ component services; the ASP web development framework; a commitment to XML and object-oriented design; support for new web services protocols such as SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI; and a focus on the Internet.
The platform consists of four separate product groups:
- Development tools
A set of languages, including C# and VB.NET; a set of development tools, including Visual Studio.NET; a comprehensive class library for building web services and web and Windows applications; as well as the Common Language Runtime to execute objects built within this framework.
- Specialized servers
A set of .NET Enterprise Servers, formerly known as SQL Server 2000, Exchange 2000, BizTalk 2000, and so on, that provide specialized functionality for relational data storage, email, and B2B commerce.
- Web services
An offering of commercial web services, recently announced as project HailStorm; for a fee, developers can use these services in building applications that require knowledge of user identity.
- Devices
New .NET-enabled non-PC devices, from cell phones to game boxes.
Microsoft is devoting considerable resources to the development and success of .NET and related technologies: their bets are on .NET as the next big thing in computing.
Microsoft has spent the last three years behind closed doors creating Microsoft .NET, which was publicly launched at PDC 2000 in Orlando, Florida. While the main strategy of .NET is to enable software as a service, .NET is much more than that. Aside from embracing the Web, Microsoft .NET acknowledges and responds to the following trends within the software industry today:
- Distributed computing
Simplifies the development of robust client/server applications. Current distributed technologies require high vendor-affinity and lack interoperation with the Web. Microsoft .NET provides a remoting architecture that exploits open Internet standards, including the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), Extensible Markup Language (XML), and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP).
- Componentization
Simplifies the integration of software components developed by different vendors. The Component Object Model (COM) has brought reality to software plug-and-play, but COM component development and deployment are too complex. Microsoft .NET provides a simpler way to build and deploy components.
- Enterprise services
Allow the development of scalable, enterprise applications without writing code to manage transaction, security, or pooling. Microsoft .NET continues to support enterprise services, since these services have greatly reduced development time and effort for building large-scale applications.
- Web paradigm shifts
Represents changes in web technologies to simplify the development of web applications. Over the last few years, web application development has shifted from connectivity (TCP/IP), to presentation (HTML), to programmability (XML and SOAP). A key goal of Microsoft .NET is to enable software to be sold and distributed as a service.
Although these are the main concepts that Microsoft .NET incorporates, what’s more notable is that Microsoft .NET uses open Internet standards (HTTP, XML, and SOAP) at its core to transmit an object from one machine to another across the Internet. In fact, there is bidirectional mapping between XML and objects in .NET. For example, a class can be expressed as an XML Schema Definition (XSD); an object can be converted to and from an XML buffer; a method can be specified using an XML format called Web Services Description Language (WSDL); and an invocation (method call) can be expressed using an XML format called SOAP.