1 Introducing the .NET Framework with C#

1 Introducing the .NET Framework with C#

The .NET Framework is such a comprehensive platform that it can be a little difficult to describe. I have heard it described as a Development Platform, an Execution Environment, and an Operating System among other things. In fact, in some ways each of these descriptions is accurate, if not sufficiently precise.

The software industry has become much more complex since the introduction of the Internet. Users have become both more sophisticated and less sophisticated at the same time. (I suspect not many individual users have undergone both metamorphoses but as a body of users this has certainly happened). Folks who had never touched a computer less than five years ago are now comfortably including the Internet in their daily lives. Meanwhile, the technophile or professional computer user has become much more advanced, as have their expectations from software.

It is this collective expectation from software that drives our industry. Each time a software developer creates a successful new idea, they raise user expectations for the next new feature. In a way this has been true for years. But now software developers face the added challenge of addressing the Internet and Internet-users in many applications that in the past were largely unconnected. It is this new challenge that the .NET Framework directly addresses.