1. Getting Ready
Welcome friends to the exciting journey of Microsoft .NET. If you are looking for
information about what .NET is all about, what it can do for you or how it can help you
and your customers, you have come to the right place. This section is intended to tell you
about these and many more things. After covering this section you will be ready to delve
into details of .NET.
The section is divided into following sub-sections:
1) Tracing the .NET History
2) Flavors of .NET
3) Features of .NET
4) Installing .NET Framework SDK
The first sub-section will introduce you with how .NET evolved and the path of .NET
since its Beta releases.
The second sub-section will introduce you with various flavors of...NET and their
respective SDKs. It also gives overview of Visual Studio.NET an excellent IDE for
developing .NET applications.
It is necessary to understand the features of .NET that make it robust, programmer
friendly, powerful and flexible. The third sub-section is intended just for that. It gives
overview of technical features that make .NET shine over traditional programming
environments.
The final sub-section tells you how to install .NET framework SDK, what are the system
requirements and related topics.
Sometime in the July 2000, Microsoft announced a whole new software development
framework for Windows called .NET in the Professional Developer Conference (PDC).
Microsoft also released PDC version of the software for the developers to test. After
initial testing and feedback Beta 1 of .NET was announced. Beta 1 of the .NET itself got
lot of attention from the developer community. When Microsoft announced Beta 2, it
incorporated many changes suggested by the community and internals into the software.
The overall `Beta' phase lasted for more than 1 ½ years. Finally, in March 2002
Microsoft released final version of the .NET framework.