What Is .NET?
At first glance, .NET might seem to be just a marketing concept, a way of avoiding yet another number at the end of Visual Basic, but it is much more than that. .NET represents an entire platform on which you can develop applications. Just as the operating system provides a level of base functionality to applications (such as the capability to read files from a hard drive or floppy disk), .NET is a layer that exists beneath your programs and provides a set of base services and functions. The .NET environment can be broken into these three key elements:
The Common Language Runtime (CLR)
The Common Type System (CTS)
The Microsoft Windows .NET Framework (no real acronym for this one)
The Common Language Runtime is the underlying system ...
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