Emergence of the .NET Platform


The Microsoft .NET Framework was released in January 2002, shortly after the Common Language Infrastructure, a key component, was ratified by the European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA) standards body. A key part of it was a new language, C#, designed to be a simple, modern, object-oriented and type-safe language derived from C and C++. As a result, it bears many syntactic similarities to C++ and Java.

The framework was designed as a long-term replacement for the aging component technologies of COM and COM+, which had faced many challenges, particularly around management and interoperability. The up and coming XML Web services standards were identified as a major future trend by Microsoft and were placed front and center in the design, implementation, and marketing of the .NET framework. In addition to Web services, a number of technologies became key to the framework, such as .NET remoting, ASP.NET, ADO.NET and XML. In addition to this, .NET applications were deployed to run on the Common Language Runtime (CLR), which is effectively a virtual machine that could be run on any platform. A benefit of this approach is that it allows for a multi-language development environment, where the code that runs on the CLR is an intermediate language compiled identically from C#, VB.NET, or other .NET languages. Therefore, an application might consist of code written in multiple languages. The CLR also implements a Just-In-Time (JIT) compiler that converts this intermediate language into native machine code for execution. At present, Microsoft has released the CLR for the various Windows platforms as well as an implementation called Rotor for FreeBSD.

An interesting offshoot of the .NET Framework is the independently developed and maintained Mono framework. This is a multi-platform, open-source implementation of many of the .NET Framework namespaces and tools that allows developers to build applications using C# and run them on a variety of platforms including MacOS and Linux. It is built upon the open ECMA standards that .NET is based on, and as such applications written for it are closely compatible with those written on the original .NET as far as interoperability is concerned.

This chapter provides a tour of the .NET Framework, looking at the underlying architecture and how it works. It includes a tour of the CLR as well as an overview of the programming framework, in particular the technologies for interoperability that it encompasses.




Java EE and. Net Interoperability(c) Integration Strategies, Patterns, and Best Practices
Java EE and .NET Interoperability: Integration Strategies, Patterns, and Best Practices
ISBN: 0131472232
EAN: 2147483647
Year: N/A
Pages: 170

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