The .NET Framework 4.6 for Desktop

Microsoft .NET Framework 4.6 for Desktop is a complex technology that provides the infrastructure for building, running, and managing Windows and web applications. In a layered representation, the .NET Framework is a layer positioned between the Microsoft Windows operating system and your applications. .NET Framework 4.6 is composed of several parts, including libraries, executable tools, and relationships, and it integrates with the Windows operating system. Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 relies on the new version of the .NET Framework 4.6. Visual Basic 2015, C# 6.0, and F# 4.0 are .NET languages that can build applications for the .NET Framework 4.6. The new version of this technology introduces important new features that will be described later. In this chapter you get an overview of the most important features of the .NET Framework so that you will know how applications built with Visual Basic 2015 can run and how they can be built. From a developer’s perspective, with .NET Framework 4.6 you can build the following kinds of applications:

Web applications with the ASP.NET 4.6 platform.

Windows desktop applications with the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) platform.

Windows desktop applications with the Windows Forms platform. Windows Forms is still supported by Microsoft, but it is an obsolete platform and should only be used for maintaining existing programs. (The latest update to Windows Forms was in 2010.) You should never use Windows Forms on new projects but should use WPF instead.

Distributed services for exchanging data through networks with Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) services (server side only) and WebAPI services.

.NET Core 5 targets other kinds of applications, as described in the next section.