If we were to describe Microsoft
.NET in one sentence it would be
like this: Microsoft .NET (Dot Net)
is a method of secured distributed
computing which is completely based
on Internet standards and uses the
Internet as the transferring media.
So what does this mean??? To
understand this sentence lets look
at the progress of computers and
business applications.You may
remember the early
days of computing where computers were
huge machines filling up rooms and
requiring a full time staff to
operate them,. These computers were
called main frames. The clients of
these machines were called "dumb"
terminals and had no say on how
the software should run. Then
came the PC, and the world changed.
The PC now had the capability of
making decisions on its own and did
not need a big main frame to tell it
how to do its work. Then came a
need to have a central
computer to share data and offload some of the work
that was done by the PC, such as an
email server, and that was the birth
of distributed computing. However
this model was mostly designed for
networks that had enough bandwidth
to transfer the large amounts of data between
the client (PC) and the server; and
everything was OK until the Internet
became popular.
With the advent of the Internet,
people needed to run applications on
the Internet where there is not a
lot of bandwidth and web pages were
borne to give us this capability.
Using web pages we could go to a web site and
purchase products on-line and have
the money taken out of our credit
card account. Then things got a
little more complicated. People
actually wanted to use the Internet
just like they use their local
network. They wanted to run client
server applications over the
Internet and companies wanted to
communicate with each other over the
Internet. That is when problems
began to arise and limitations
became apparent.
The Internet was first designed
to transfer small amounts of text
data between remote locations, but
then users wanted to transfer large
quantities of data (which is not
text based) to make our applications
work. A set of standards were
then created to accomplish this task.
These standards are the backbone
that Microsoft .NET is built on. The
purpose of Microsoft .NET is to make
client server communication possible
over the Internet. To do this
Microsoft used Internet standards
such as XML (a method for
representing data) and SOAP (a
method of addressing and
encapsulating data just like an
envelope) to make data available on
the Internet to the PC's or any
other device that might need that
data. This could mean devices such
as Smart Phones (Web capable
phones), Play Station or Xbox, and PDAs such as Palm Pilot.
So what is Microsoft .NET
supposed to do? Microsoft .NET is a
framework to enable software to talk
to each other over the web. Imagine having a calculator
that solves very complicated
algorithms. You could load the
calculator on your computer, type
the equation in, click the equal sign, and
your calculator would make a call
over the internet to a very powerful
server somewhere in some university.
After the equation is solved
you would get the answer passed
back to your calculator which
ultimately displays the solution for you. Now
isn't that cool...
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