.NET & XML

The .NET Framework

Unlike Windows (and operating systems generally), .NET is a software platform that enables developers to create software applications that are network-native. A network-native application is one whose natural environment is a standards-based network, such as the Internet or a corporate intranet. Rather than merely coexisting with the network, the network-native application is designed from the ground up to use the network as its playground. The alphabet soup of network standards includes such players as Internet Protocol (IP), Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and others.

.NET enables componentization of software; that is, it allows developers to create small units of functionality, called assemblies in .NET, that can later be reused by other developers. These components can reside locally, on a standalone machine, or they can reside elsewhere on a network. Componentization is not new; previous attempts at building component software environments have included Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) and the Component Object Model (COM).

An important factor in the componentization of software is language integration. You may already be familiar with the concept of language independence, which means that you can develop software components in any of the languages that .NET supports and use the components you develop in any of those languages. However, language integration goes a step further, meaning that those languages support .NET natively. ...