.NET is a development platform and framework by Microsoft.
According to the video above, a development platform is a set of languages and libraries that enable developers to create and run software applications. That means that the .NET platform needs to be installed in your development environment so that you can create, debug, and test your .NET application, and the .NET platform needs to be present anywhere that a .NET application is running.
There are a few flavors of the .NET platform:
- .NET Framework
- .NET Core
- Xamarin/Mono
.NET Framework is the version of .NET that is tailored for use creating/running apps on Windows.
.NET Core is the version of .NET for creating and running applications that are cross-platform. .NET Core can be used to create/run .NET Core application on Windows, MacOS, and Linux. The .NET Foundation supports .NET Core, which is open source.
Xamarin/Mono is a .NET implementation/extension for creating and running applications on mobile Operating Systems (Android and iOS).
The .NET platform supports a set of development languages by Microsoft for specific use on .NET:
- C#
- F#
- Visual Basic
Putting all of this together, it should makes sense that .NET applications are software applications written in one of the languages supported by .NET (C#, F#, VB), and .NET applications require and run on .NET (the platform).
Why use a Development Platform?
For anyone that might be asking this question, a development platform allows developers to more simply create complex software applications. The libraries and languages of a development platform allow people to perform common tasks in simple, efficient, and predefined ways by providing standard data types, functions, and data management flows so that developers don’t have to build everything from scratch. These capabilities are easily extensible within the development framework so that developers can create more complex data types, functions, and libraries. Development platforms promote standardized development in order to allow for modularization and sharing/reuse of code.
Resources
Thanks!
Thanks for reading! Check out .NET and Raspberry Pi for a fun tutorial!