Chapter 2. Microsoft .NET

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Microsoft .NET ”which at the time of writing consists of Visual Studio .NET, the .NET Framework SDK, .NET servers, and Windows .NET ”is Microsoft's strategic platform and toolset for building and deploying the next generation of enterprise applications. If you're going to be involved in any way with designing and creating applications running under Microsoft Windows, you need to understand .NET.

Microsoft created .NET to provide a comprehensive platform for building and running distributed applications. The .NET Framework and Visual Studio .NET provide a core set of services that take much of the drudgery out of building such applications, while the .NET servers supply additional extended functionality for exploiting .NET and for deploying and managing distributed systems. In this chapter, we'll take a tour of Microsoft .NET and examine the main features. In particular, we'll look at the common language runtime and how it supports cross-language development, memory management, deployment of .NET applications and libraries, the .NET Framework Class Library, and security.

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