The .NET Platform
When Microsoft announced C# 1.0 in July 2000, its unveiling was part of a much larger event: the announcement of the .NET platform. The .NET platform is a development framework that provides a new way to create Windows applications. However, .NET goes beyond traditional Windows programming to facilitate creating web applications quickly and easily.
Microsoft reportedly devoted 80% of its research and development budget to .NET and its associated technologies. The results of this commitment were very impressive. In 2005, Microsoft rolled out version 2 of the language, the platform, and the tools. Its goal was to radically reduce the amount of boilerplate code you have to write, and to make the creation of web and desktop applications easier by “encapsulating” much of the “plumbing” of a typical application into objects. That means that rather than writing a lot of the code to connect to databases, the Internet, or your filesystem, .NET provides fully tested objects that will do all the heavy lifting for you.
In 2007, .NET version 3.0 brought .NET up-to-date with Microsoft’s new Vista and Windows Server 2008 operating systems. The most visible change in this version of the framework was to provide support for the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), which opens up new graphics possibilities, such as those you’ll find in Windows Vista, as you’ll see later in this book. And now, with the release of Visual Studio 2008, .NET version 3.5 supports more new features, including ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access