When Microsoft announced C# 1.0 in July 2000, its unveiling was part of a much larger event: the announcement of the .NET platform. The .NET platform is a development framework that provides a new way to create Windows applications. However, .NET goes beyond traditional Windows programming to facilitate creating web applications quickly and easily.
Microsoft reportedly devoted 80% of its research and development budget to .NET and its associated technologies. The results of this commitment were very impressive. In 2005, Microsoft rolled out version 2 of the language, the platform, and the tools. Its goal was to radically reduce the amount of boilerplate code you have to write, and to make the creation of web and desktop applications easier by “encapsulating” much of the “plumbing” of a typical application into objects. That means that rather than writing a lot of the code to connect to databases, the Internet, or your filesystem, .NET provides fully tested objects that will do all the heavy lifting for you.
In 2007, .NET version 3.0 brought .NET up-to-date with Microsoft’s new Vista and Windows Server 2008 operating systems. The most visible change in this version of the framework was to provide support for the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), which opens up new graphics possibilities, such as those you’ll find in Windows Vista, as you’ll see later in this book. And now, with the release of Visual Studio 2008, .NET version 3.5 supports more new features, including LINQ, a new feature that allows you to query databases with a more natural, object-oriented syntax.
The scope of .NET is huge. The platform consists of three separate product groups:
A set of languages, including C# and Visual Basic .NET; a set of development tools, including Visual Studio 2008; and powerful tools for building applications, including the Common Language Runtime (CLR), a platform for compiling, debugging, and executing .NET applications
A set of Enterprise Servers, including SQL Server 2008, Exchange, BizTalk, and so on, that provide specialized functionality for relational data storage, email, business-to-business (B2B) commerce, and so forth
.NET-enabled non-PC devices, from cell phones to game boxes
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