Microsoft® .NET Kick Start

Other .NET Programming Languages

If you thought support for four programming languages (C#, Visual Basic .NET, C++, and J#) made .NET programming flexible, you haven't realized the whole story yet. Because every program will end up in MSIL and then be executed later by the CLR, it is possible to write a compiler for practically any programming language, whether it supports object-oriented constructs, functional programming constructs, modular programming constructs, or plain-old procedural constructs, so that it can be compiled into MSIL. This has been the drive behind extensive third-party programming language support for .NET. Chances are that if you know a programming language, it has already been ported to .NET. This goes for APL, COBOL, ...