.NET

The .NET Framework is Microsoft's application development platform that enables developers to easily create Windows applications, web applications, and web services using a myriad of different programming languages, and without having to worry about low-level details like memory management and processor-specific instructions.

NET is probably one of the more muddled and mismanaged brands in the history of Microsoft. If you go to microsoft.com it will tell you that ".NET is the Microsoft Web services strategy to connect information, people, systems, and devices through software," but this isn't what most people are thinking of when they say, ".NET." What is commonly referred to as .NET is programming with the .NET Framework.

One of the most important facets of the .NET Framework is language independence. You can write .NET applications using any number of different programming languages. The most popular languages tend to be C# and VB.NET, but many other languages now have .NET versions including Python, COBOL, and more……

The .NET runtime is actually based on a standard developed by Microsoft called the CLI or Common Language Infrastructure, portions of which have been submitted to Ecma as an international standard. Because the CLR is based on an open standard, there have been a number of alternative CLR implementations, most notably Rotor and Mono. Rotor was a project from Microsoft Research, is a version of the CLR that will run on Mac OS, and is shared source. Mono is an independent open source implementation of the CLR that runs on various Linux distributions.