Internet Functionality And Development Tools

By David Platt

December 21, 2000

(Understanding Microsoft .NET, Part I :  Page 3 of 4 )

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Understanding Microsoft .NET, Part I Common Language Runtime Internet Functionality And Development Tools To Learn More

The .NET framework also contains new levels of prefabricated functionality for performing common tasks of Internet programming.

ASP.NET is a large evolutionary release of Microsoft's existing ASP product, containing such features as automatic recycling of processes, better organization of code and presentation, and security that's much easier to program. It also has .NET Web Forms, which contains new smart controls for putting on Web pages. For example, validator controls check that the user has made a valid entry in a mandatory field. They are smart enough to check the browser they are running in and perform their validation logic on the client side if possible, thus avoiding a server round trip.

The .NET Windows Forms package contains functionality for writing rich clients that run on a Windows platform. Finally, .NET Web Services is a function-based way to expose software functionality on one machine to programs running on another machine. It lets clients invoke a function on a server using HTTP requests or SOAP, which I described in my August 21 Byte column I've written a long technical article on .NET Web Services, due to be published in the February issue of MSDN magazine (URL at bottom of page).

I'll be devoting my entire column after the next one (on the .NET framework) to the prefabricated Internet technology features of .NET.

3. Visual Studio.NET

This is the next version of Microsoft's popular Visual Studio programming environment. Microsoft's aim is to make this product the best environment for developing .NET apps, and I'm quite impressed with the Beta 1 version. Martin Heller discussed it in a recent Byte column, so I probably won't be writing much about it myself. I will point out here that Visual Studio is not required for writing apps that access the .NET framework or any of the prefabricated Internet functionality I described in the last two sections; these will be part of the operating system.

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