An Overview of C#

The computing industry is starting to brace itself for a new technology that will become available in the next few months. Microsoft,the primary driver of this change and in an effort to bring desktop and Internet computing to new levels, is pushing and selling to the world their .NET Framework.

What is .NET? Last June 2000, Microsoft coined a new word to encapsulate their strategy and called it .NET. If you start reading different articles, news and other materials on .NET, you may find yourself confused and lost. Don't be dismayed, similar to the ActiveX announcement, nobody exactly knew what it means except Microsoft. That's because .NET represents a range of technologies and this site aims to uncover some the conflicting definitions and terms surrounding .NET.

New strategy, requires new tools .NET is based on a concept called network computing, which is not a new concept. Other companies such as Sun and Oracle made network computing popular. In fact, Oracle promoted the NetPC as the next best thing to desktop computing. Both Sun and Oracle's concept of network computing is based on the thin client concept; which means most applications are run on the server and very little software is required on the desktop.

Microsoft too saw the advantages of the network computing environment, however believes that thick client concept will make network computing a reality. Thick client means more applications running on the desktop. The result of a vision of a network computing environment is the .NET Framework and to make this vision a reality, it is required that we look at things differently - meaning we need new tools to do new things.

Do we really need a new programming language? The software development market today is proliferated with programming languages offering different features and always boasts of advantages over other programming languages. Just when the software industry got its head around Java and starting to reap the benefits, do we really need another programming language?

Believe it or not, new programming language comes up almost every year. Most of which comes from research made in universities. The reason for this is because we are constantly searching for better ways to develop software. We always seek which programming language can be less abused? Resulting to lesser bugs, faster development time, and minimum development effort. At the same token, we want a programming language that is very expressive, which gives programmers the ability to solve complex issues. All of these things are drivers for  searching a better programming language.

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