Application Development Using Visual Basic and .NET By Robert J. Oberg, Peter Thorsteinson, Dana L. Wyatt
Table of Contents
Chapter 1. What Is Microsoft .NET?
Microsoft .NET is a new platform built on top of the operating system. It provides many capabilities for building and deploying both standard applications and new Web-based ones. Web services allow applications to expose functionality across the Internet, typically using the SOAP protocol. SOAP supports a high degree of interoperability, since it is based on widely adopted standards such as HTTP and XML.
.NET uses managed code running on the Common Language Runtime that employs the Common Type System. The .NET Framework is a very large class library available consistently across many languages. XML plays a fundamental role in .NET. All this functionality can be used to build more robust Windows applications as well as Internet applications.
VB.NET is a completely modernized version of Visual Basic that works seamlessly with the .NET Framework. There is strong interoperability support in .NET that enables new applications created in VB.NET to work with legacy VB6 applications and with applications written in other languages and on other platforms.
In the next chapter we will go deeper into .NET and begin exploring the .NET programming model.
