A Peek Inside the .NET Framework

The .NET Framework is a group of components developed by Microsoft that make it faster and easier to create all sorts of Windows- based applications, especially applications that can take advantage of the Web. To help you get a better sense of the .NET Framework, let s take a look at how it relates to Windows.

Windows itself the operating system is a collection of programs. It has programs for displaying information on the screen, other programs for reading and writing to the disk, and still others for printing to the printer. Obviously, this explanation is greatly simplified. As you know, Windows contains hundreds of millions of bytes of code, many of which are devoted to terrifically abstruse tasks.

Traditionally, if you wanted to get Windows to print a document, for example, you wrote a program that called the Windows printing program. Also traditionally, you wrote this program using a language such as C, which for various reasons was well-suited to talking to Windows at the esoteric level that Windows preferred. (A notable exception to this tradition is Visual Basic, which makes Windows programming accessible to non-C programmers.) Programming Windows with C in this way has some disadvantages, however. One disadvantage is that you have to work at a very intimate level with Windows. Another is that C is a programming language that is extremely powerful but that assumes you know what you re doing a power tool that includes very few safety features.

The .NET Framework, then, is an extra layer of programs between you and the programs that constitute Windows. If you want to program Windows, you can call on the programs in the .NET Framework, and the .NET Framework in turn talks to Windows. The .NET Framework makes many Windows-based tasks simpler. It also includes many more safety features, so although you might still crash your own programs, at least you won t also crash Windows.

At this point, you might be saying, All this information is fine, but where is the .NET Framework? You can download and install the .NET Framework for free. (I ll explain how to install it in Chapter 3.) After you ve installed the .NET Framework, you ll find that it s just a collection of programs that you can call through the Web pages you write. In this book, we ll be concentrating on using ASP.NET for programming Web pages and ADO.NET for working with data. However, if you re interested in other features of Microsoft .NET, such as creating Windows Forms, programming graphics, or writing communications software, you ll be able to work with those, too, once you ve downloaded and installed the .NET Framework.