| When Microsoft announced its plans for .NET, it surprised many developers, especially Visual Basic developers, who saw it as a giant step backward for "Rapid Application Development." But the release of the .NET Framework version 1.0 in 2002 did bring many needed benefits. .NET introduced a unified programming environment. All .NET-enabled languages compile to "Microsoft Intermediate Language" before being assembled into platform-specific machine code. Visual Basic and C# are language wrappers around this common .NET "language." Because all .NET-enabled compilers speak the same underlying language, they no longer suffer from the many data and language conflicts inherent in other component-based systems such as COM. The .NET version of Visual Studio also unified the standard user interface that lets programmers craft source code. .NET committed developers to object-oriented technologies. Not only does .NET fully embrace the object-oriented programming paradigm, everything in .NET is contained in an object: all data values, all source code blocks, and the plumbing for all user-initiated events. Everything appears in the context of an object. .NET simplified Windows programming. Programming in Visual Basic before .NET was easy enough, until it came time to interact with one of the API libraries, something that happened a lot in professional programming. With .NET, most of these APIs are replaced with a hierarchy of objects providing access to many commonly needed Windows features. Because the hierarchy is extensible, other vendors can add new functionality without disrupting the existing framework. .NET enhanced security. Users and administrators can now establish security rules for different .NET features to limit malicious programs from doing their damage. .NET's "managed" environment also resolved buffer overrun issues and memory leaks through features such as strong data typing and garbage collection. .NET enhanced developer productivity through standards. The .NET Framework is built upon and uses many new and existing standards, such as XML and SOAP. This enhances data interchange not only on the Windows platform, but also in interactions with other platforms and systems. .NET enhanced Web-based development. Until .NET, a lot of Web-based development was done using scripting languages. .NET brings the power of compiled, desktop development to the Internet. .NET simplified the deployment of applications. If .NET is installed on a system, releasing a program is as simple as copying its EXE file to the target system (although an install program is much more user-friendly). Features such as side-by-side deployment, ClickOnce deployment (new in 2005), and an end to file version conflicts and "DLL hell" (the presence of multiple versions of the same DLL on a system, or the inability to remove a version of a DLL) make desktop and Web-based deployments a snap.
If you didn't understand some of the terms used in this section, that's all right. You will encounter them again, with explanations, in later chapters. |
