Programming C# 3.0, 5th Edition

The .NET Platform

When Microsoft announced C# in July 2000, its unveiling was part of a much larger event: the announcement of the .NET platform. The .NET platform was, in my view, an object-oriented operating system in disguise, laid on top of the existing operating system.

.NET 3.5 represents a further maturation of that framework and brings with it new ways to create, well, just about everything, while making nothing you've learned obsolete.

You can still create server-only web applications, but with AJAX, you can add client-side controls (and AJAX provides support for much more, including automatic JSON encoding and decoding). You can still create Windows Forms applications for Windows applications, but you can also create richer Windows applications using WPF, which uses a declarative syntax called XAML (explained in some detail in Chapter 18). That same XAML is used in creating WF applications, which can be used, among other things, as a business layer for your applications.

Tip

For a full exploration of the new .NET Framework, please see Programming .NET 3.5 by Jesse Liberty and Alex Horowitz (O'Reilly).

In one of the more exciting additions to the Framework, you can now use that same XAML to produce cross-platform (as of this writing, Windows, Mac, and Unix) and cross-browser (Firefox and Safari) Rich Internet Applications using Microsoft's Silverlight.

Tip

For a full exploration of Silverlight, please see my blog at http://silverlight.net/blogs/jesseliberty, and watch for my book, ...