Portal:.NET Framework

Microsoft started development on the .NET Framework in the late 1990s originally under the name of Next Generation Windows Services (NGWS). By late 2001 the first beta versions of .NET 1.0 were released. The first version of .NET Framework was released on 13 February 2002, bringing managed code to Windows NT 4.0, 98, 2000, ME and XP.

Since the first version, Microsoft has released nine more upgrades for .NET Framework, seven of which have been released along with a new version of Visual Studio. Two of these upgrades, .NET Framework 2.0 and 4.0, have upgraded Common Language Runtime (CLR). New versions of .NET Framework replace older versions when the CLR version is the same. Read more...

Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) is a component of .NET Framework 4.0 aiming to create lightweight, extensible applications. It aims to allow .NET application developers to discover and use extensions with no configuration required. It also aims to let extension developers encapsulate code easily and avoid fragile hard dependencies. Furthermore, it aims to allow extensions to be reused across applications. MEF was introduced as a part of .NET 4.0 and Silverlight 4. Read more...

Microsoft Corporation (MS) is an American multinational technology company with headquarters in Redmond, Washington. It develops, manufactures, licenses, supports and sells computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services. Its best known software products are the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, the Microsoft Office suite, and the Internet Explorer and Edge web browsers. Its flagship hardware products are the Xbox video game consoles and the Microsoft Surface lineup of touchscreen personal computers. As of 2016, it is the world's largest software maker by revenue, and one of the world's most valuable companies. The word "Microsoft" is a portmanteau of "microcomputer" and "software". Microsoft is ranked No. 30 in the 2018 Fortune 500 rankings of the largest United States corporations by total revenue.

Microsoft was founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen on April 4, 1975, to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800. It rose to dominate the personal computer operating system market with MS-DOS in the mid-1980s, followed by Microsoft Windows. The company's 1986 initial public offering (IPO), and subsequent rise in its share price, created three billionaires and an estimated 12,000 millionaires among Microsoft employees. Since the 1990s, it has increasingly diversified from the operating system market and has made a number of corporate acquisitions, their largest being the acquisition of LinkedIn for $26.2 billion in December 2016, followed by their acquisition of Skype Technologies for $8.5 billion in May 2011. Read more...

Microsoft Silverlight (or simply Silverlight) is a deprecated application framework for writing and running rich Internet applications, similar to Adobe Flash. A plugin for Silverlight is still available for some browsers. While early versions of Silverlight focused on streaming media, later versions supported multimedia, graphics, and animation and gave developers support for CLI languages and development tools. Silverlight was also one of the two application development platforms for Windows Phone, but web pages that use Silverlight did not run on the Windows Phone or Windows Mobile versions of Internet Explorer, as there was no Silverlight plugin for Internet Explorer on those platforms. Read more...

Microsoft Blend for Visual Studio (formerly Microsoft Expression Blend) is a user interface design tool developed and sold by Microsoft for creating graphical interfaces for web and desktop applications that blend the features of these two types of applications. It is an interactive, WYSIWYG front-end for designing XAML-based interfaces for Windows Presentation Foundation, Silverlight and UWP applications. It was one of the applications in the Microsoft Expression Studio suite before that suite was discontinued.

Expression Blend supports the WPF text engine with advanced OpenType typography and ClearType, vector-based 2D widgets, and 3D widgets with hardware acceleration via DirectX. Read more...

Parallel Extensions was the development name for a managed concurrency library developed by a collaboration between Microsoft Research and the CLR team at Microsoft. The library was released in version 4.0 of the .NET Framework. It is composed of two parts: Parallel LINQ (PLINQ) and Task Parallel Library (TPL). It also consists of a set of coordination data structures (CDS) – sets of data structures used to synchronize and co-ordinate the execution of concurrent tasks. Read more...

Language Integrated Query (LINQ, pronounced "link") is a Microsoft .NET Framework component that adds native data querying capabilities to .NET languages, originally released as a major part of .NET Framework 3.5 in 2007.

LINQ extends the language by the addition of query expressions, which are akin to SQL statements, and can be used to conveniently extract and process data from arrays, enumerable classes, XML documents, relational databases, and third-party data sources. Other uses, which utilize query expressions as a general framework for readably composing arbitrary computations, include the construction of event handlers or monadic parsers. It also defines a set of method names (called standard query operators, or standard sequence operators), along with translation rules used by the compiler to translate fluent-style query expressions into expressions using these method names, lambda expressions and anonymous types. Many of the concepts that LINQ introduced were originally tested in Microsoft's Cω research project. Read more...

The Native Image Generator, or simply NGen, is the ahead-of-time compilation (AOT) service of the .NET Framework. It allows a CLI assembly to be pre-compiled instead of letting the Common Language Runtime (CLR) do a just-in-time compilation (JIT) at runtime. In some cases the execution will be significantly faster than with JIT. Read more...

JetBrains s.r.o. (formerly IntelliJ Software s.r.o.) is a software development company whose tools are targeted towards software developers and project managers.

, the company has around 700 employees in its six offices in Prague, Saint Petersburg, Moscow, Munich, Boston and Novosibirsk. Read more...

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is a graphical subsystem by Microsoft for rendering user interfaces in Windows-based applications. WPF, previously known as "Avalon", was initially released as part of .NET Framework 3.0 in 2006. WPF uses DirectX and attempts to provide a consistent programming model for building applications. It separates the user interface from business logic, and resembles similar XML-oriented object models, such as those implemented in XUL and SVG.

WPF employs XAML, an XML-based language, to define and link various interface elements. WPF applications can be deployed as standalone desktop programs or hosted as an embedded object in a website. WPF aims to unify a number of common user interface elements, such as 2D/3D rendering, fixed and adaptive documents, typography, vector graphics, runtime animation, and pre-rendered media. These elements can then be linked and manipulated based on various events, user interactions, and data bindings. Read more...

The Common Language Runtime (CLR), the virtual machine component of Microsoft's .NET framework, manages the execution of .NET programs. Just-in-time compilation converts the managed code (compiled intermediate language code), into machine instructions which are then executed on the CPU of the computer. The CLR provides additional services including memory management, type safety, exception handling, garbage collection, security and thread management. All programs written for the .NET framework, regardless of programming language, are executed by the CLR. All versions of the .NET framework include CLR. The CLR team was started June 13, 1998.

CLR implements the Virtual Execution System (VES) as defined in the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) standard, initially developed by Microsoft itself. A public standard defines the Common Language Infrastructure specification. Read more...

Microsoft Visual Studio Express is a set of integrated development environments (IDEs) developed by Microsoft as a freeware and registerware function-limited version of the non-free Microsoft Visual Studio. Express editions started with Visual Studio 2005.

Visual Studio Express was supplanted by the Visual Studio Community edition, which is also available for free. but with different license. Compared to Visual Studio Express, the new license is more friendly to open-source but less for some closed source developers. The community edition works with plugins, a feature that was previously exclusive to the paid editions (Professional and higher). Express editions of Visual Studio 2015 are, however, still available for the time being. A final version was released in 2017. Read more...

ASP.NET Web Forms is a web application framework and one of several programming models supported by the Microsoft ASP.NET technology. Web Forms applications can be written in any programming language which supports the Common Language Runtime, such as C# or Visual Basic. Main building blocks of Web Forms pages are server controls, which are reusable components responsible for rendering HTML markup and responding to events. A technique called view state is used to persist the state of server controls between normally stateless HTTP requests.

Web Forms was included in the original .NET Framework 1.0 release in 2002 (see .NET Framework version history and ASP.NET version history), as the first programming model available in ASP.NET. Unlike newer ASP.NET components, Web Forms is not supported by ASP.NET Core. Read more...

.NET Compiler Platform, also known by its nickname Roslyn, is a set of open-source compilers and code analysis APIs for C# and Visual Basic .NET languages from Microsoft.

The project notably includes self-hosting versions of the C# and VB.NET compilers – compilers written in the languages themselves. The compilers are available via the traditional command-line programs but also as APIs available natively from within .NET code. Roslyn exposes modules for syntactic (lexical) analysis of code, semantic analysis, dynamic compilation to CIL, and code emission. Read more...

Razor is an ASP.NET programming syntax used to create dynamic web pages with the C# or VB.NET programming languages. Razor was in development in June 2010 and was released for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 in January 2011. Razor is a simple-syntax view engine and was released as part of MVC 3 and the WebMatrix tool set. Read more...

The ASP.NET MVC is a web application framework developed by Microsoft, which implements the model–view–controller (MVC) pattern. It is open-source software, apart from the ASP.NET Web Forms component which is proprietary.

In the later versions of ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Web API, and ASP.NET Web Pages (a platform using only Razor pages) will merge into a unified MVC 6. Read more...

Microsoft Visual Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) from Microsoft. It is used to develop computer programs, as well as websites, web apps, web services and mobile apps. Visual Studio uses Microsoft software development platforms such as Windows API, Windows Forms, Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows Store and Microsoft Silverlight. It can produce both native code and managed code.

Visual Studio includes a code editor supporting IntelliSense (the code completion component) as well as code refactoring. The integrated debugger works both as a source-level debugger and a machine-level debugger. Other built-in tools include a code profiler, forms designer for building GUI applications, web designer, class designer, and database schema designer. It accepts plug-ins that enhance the functionality at almost every level—including adding support for source control systems (like Subversion and Git) and adding new toolsets like editors and visual designers for domain-specific languages or toolsets for other aspects of the software development lifecycle (like the Team Foundation Server client: Team Explorer). Read more...

Entity Framework (EF) is an open source object-relational mapping (ORM) framework for ADO.NET. It was a part of .NET Framework, but since Entity framework version 6 it is separated from .NET framework. Read more...

.NET Reflector is a class browser, decompiler and static analyzer for software created with .NET Framework, originally written by Lutz Roeder. MSDN Magazine named it as one of the Ten Must-Have utilities for developers, and Scott Hanselman listed it as part of his "Big Ten Life and Work-Changing Utilities". Read more...

MonoDevelop (also known as Xamarin Studio) is an open-source integrated development environment for Linux, macOS, and Windows. Its primary focus is development of projects that use Mono and .NET frameworks. MonoDevelop integrates features similar to those of NetBeans and Microsoft Visual Studio, such as automatic code completion, source control, a graphical user interface (GUI) and Web designer. MonoDevelop integrates a Gtk# GUI designer called Stetic. It supports
Boo,
C,
C++,
C#,
CIL,
D,
F#,
Java,
Oxygene,
Vala, JavaScript, TypeScript
and Visual Basic.NET.

MonoDevelop can be used on Windows, macOS and Linux. Officially supported Linux distributions include CentOS, Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Ubuntu, with many other distributions providing their own unofficial builds of MonoDevelop in their repositories. macOS and Windows have been officially supported since version 2.2. Read more...

Microsoft XNA (a recursive acronym for XNA's not acronymed) is a freeware set of tools with a managed runtime environment provided by Microsoft that facilitates video game development and management. XNA is based on the .NET Framework, with versions that run on Windows NT, Windows Phone and the Xbox 360. XNA content is built with the XNA Game Studio, and played using the XNA Framework (for Windows games), or published as native executables (for Xbox 360, Windows Phone and Zune).

In many respects, XNA can be thought of as a .NET analog to Microsoft's better known game development system, DirectX, but it is aimed at developers primarily interested in writing lightweight games that run on a variety of Microsoft platforms. XNA is the basic platform for Xbox Live Indie Games. Read more...

The Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), previously known as Indigo, is a runtime and a set of APIs in the .NET Framework for building connected, service-oriented applications. Read more...

WCF Data Services (formerly ADO.NET Data Services, codename "Astoria") is a platform for what Microsoft calls Data Services. It is actually a combination of the runtime and a web service through which the services are exposed. It also includes the Data Services Toolkit which lets Astoria Data Services be created from within ASP.NET itself. The Astoria project was announced at MIX 2007, and the first developer preview was made available on April 30, 2007. The first CTP was made available as a part of the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Preview. The final version was released as part of Service Pack 1 of the .NET Framework 3.5 on August 11, 2008. The name change from ADO.NET Data Services to WCF data Services was announced at the 2009 PDC. Read more...

Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML /ˈzæməl/ (listen)) is a declarative XML-based language developed by Microsoft that is used for initializing structured values and objects. It is available under Microsoft's Open Specification Promise. The acronym originally stood for Extensible Avalon Markup Language, Avalon being the code-name for Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF).

XAML is used extensively in .NET Framework 3.0 & .NET Framework 4.0 technologies, particularly Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Silverlight, Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), Windows Runtime XAML Framework and Windows Store apps. In WPF, XAML forms a user interface markup language to define UI elements, data binding, events, and other features. In WF, workflows can be defined using XAML. XAML can also be used in Silverlight applications, Windows Phone apps and Windows Store apps. Read more...

Microsoft started development on the .NET Framework in the late 1990s originally under the name of Next Generation Windows Services (NGWS). By late 2001 the first beta versions of .NET 1.0 were released. The first version of .NET Framework was released on 13 February 2002, bringing managed code to Windows NT 4.0, 98, 2000, ME and XP.

Since the first version, Microsoft has released nine more upgrades for .NET Framework, seven of which have been released along with a new version of Visual Studio. Two of these upgrades, .NET Framework 2.0 and 4.0, have upgraded Common Language Runtime (CLR). New versions of .NET Framework replace older versions when the CLR version is the same. Read more...

The Framework Class Library (FCL) is a standard library and Microsoft's .NET Framework implementation of the Standard Libraries as defined in the Common Language Infrastructure. The FCL is a collection of reusable classes, interfaces and value types. The Base Class Library (BCL) is the core of the FCL and provides the most fundamental functionality, which includes classes in namespaces System, System.CodeDom, System.Collections, System.Diagnostics, System.Globalization, System.IO, System.Resources and System.Text. Read more...

ASP.NET Core is a free and open-source web framework, and higher performance than ASP.NET, developed by Microsoft and the community. It is a modular framework that runs on both the full .NET Framework, on Windows, and the cross-platform .NET Core. However the expected version ASP.NET Core 3 was announced to work only on .NET Core dropping support of .NET Framework.

The framework is a complete rewrite that unites the previously separate ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET Web API into a single programming model. Read more...

SharpDevelop (also styled as #develop) is a free and open source integrated development environment (IDE) for the .NET Framework, Mono, Gtk# and Glade# platforms. It supports development in C#, Visual Basic .NET, Boo, F#, IronPython and IronRuby programming languages.

It was designed as a free and lightweight alternative to Microsoft Visual Studio, and contains an equivalent feature for almost every essential Visual Studio Express feature, including features for project management, code editing, application compiling and debugging. To allow for easy project migration, SharpDevelop works natively with Visual Studio project and code files. It is able to compile applications for .NET Framework version 2.0, 3.0, 3.5, 4.0, 4.5.1 and the .NET Compact Framework 2.0 and 3.5. Read more...

The Microsoft .NET strategy is a 2000s software development and marketing plan of Microsoft Corporation. Steve Ballmer described it as the company's "most ambitious undertaking since Internet Strategy Day in 1995". In support of this strategy, between 2000 and 2002, Microsoft released ".NET" branded updates to its works, including Visual Studio .NET, Visual Basic .NET, .NET Passport, .NET My Services, .NET Framework, ASP.NET and ADO.NET. A Windows .NET Server was also announced. Microsoft had plans to include Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Exchange Server and MSN into this strategy.

By 2003, however, the .NET strategy had dwindled into a failed branding campaign because the brand had failed to articulate what Microsoft had in mind in the first place. As such, Windows .NET Server was released under the title of Windows Server 2003. Since then, Visual Studio and .NET Passport have been stripped of ".NET" in their brandings. However, Microsoft and the rest of the computing industry use ".NET" to indicate close association with .NET Framework, e.g. .NET Compiler Platform, .NET Foundation and .NET Reflector. Read more...

Windows Forms (WinForms) is a graphical (GUI) class library included as a part of Microsoft .NET Framework or Mono Framework, providing a platform to write rich client applications for desktop, laptop, and tablet PCs. While it is seen as a replacement for the earlier and more complex C++ based Microsoft Foundation Class Library, it does not offer a comparable paradigm and only acts as a platform for the user interface tier in a multi-tier solution.

At the Microsoft Connect event on December 4, 2018, Microsoft announced releasing Windows Forms as open source project on GitHub. It is released under the MIT License. With this release, Windows Forms has become available for projects targeting the .NET Core framework. However, the framework is still available only on the Windows platform and Mono's incomplete implementation of WinForms remains the only cross-platform implementation. Read more...

Redgate Software is a software company based in Cambridge, England. It develops tools for developers and data professionals and maintains community websites such as SQL Server Central and Simple Talk. It conducts events such as SQL in the City.

Redgate produces specialized database management tools for Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL and Microsoft Azure. It also produces advanced developer tools for .NET Framework, such as SmartAssembly and .NET Reflector. Read more...

Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) is a Microsoft software framework for building identity-aware applications. It provides APIs for building ASP.NET or WCF based security token services as well as tools for building claims-aware and federation capable applications.

Windows Identity Foundation is supported on IIS 6/Windows Server 2003, IIS 7/Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7. Version 1.0 shipped as a standalone product, but the product is now included as a part of Microsoft .NET Framework v4.5. Read more...

The Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) from Microsoft runs on top of the Common Language Runtime (CLR) and provides computer language services for dynamic languages. These services include:

• A dynamic type system, to be shared by all languages using the DLR services
• Dynamic method dispatch
• Dynamic code generation
• Hosting API

The DLR is used to implement dynamic languages on the .NET Framework, including the IronPython and IronRuby projects. Read more...

Dotfuscator is a tool performs a combination of code obfuscation, optimization, shrinking, and hardening on .NET, Xamarin and Universal Windows Platform apps. Ordinarily, .NET executables can easily be reverse engineered by free tools (such as dotPeek and JustDecompile), potentially exposing algorithms and intellectual property (trade secrets), licensing and security mechanisms. Also, code can be run through a debugger and its data inspected. Dotfuscator can make all of these things more difficult.

Dotfuscator was developed by PreEmptive Solutions. A free version of the .NET Obfuscator, called the Dotfuscator Community Edition, is distributed as part of Microsoft's Visual Studio. However, the current version is free for personal, non-commercial use only. Read more...

.NET Remoting is a Microsoft application programming interface (API) for interprocess communication released in 2002 with the 1.0 version of .NET Framework. It is one in a series of Microsoft technologies that began in 1990 with the first version of Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) for 16-bit Windows. Intermediate steps in the development of these technologies were Component Object Model (COM) released in 1993 and updated in 1995 as COM-95, Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM), released in 1997 (and renamed Active X), and COM+ with its Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS), released in 2000. It is now superseded by Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), which is part of the .NET Framework 3.0.

Like its family members and similar technologies such as Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) and Java's remote method invocation (RMI), .NET Remoting is complex, yet its essence is straightforward. With the assistance of operating system and network agents, a client process sends a message to a server process and receives a reply. Read more...

ASP.NET is an open-source server-side web application framework designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. It was developed by Microsoft to allow programmers to build dynamic web sites, web applications and web services.

It was first released in January 2002 with version 1.0 of the .NET Framework, and is the successor to Microsoft's Active Server Pages (ASP) technology. ASP.NET is built on the Common Language Runtime (CLR), allowing programmers to write ASP.NET code using any supported .NET language. The ASP.NET SOAP extension framework allows ASP.NET components to process SOAP messages. Read more...

Xamarin is a Microsoft-owned San Francisco-based software company founded in May 2011 by the engineers that created Mono, Xamarin.Android (formerly Mono for Android) and Xamarin.iOS (formerly MonoTouch), which are cross-platform implementations of the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) and Common Language Specifications (often called Microsoft .NET).

With a C#-shared codebase, developers can use Xamarin tools to write native Android, iOS, and Windows apps with native user interfaces and share code across multiple platforms, including Windows and macOS. According to Xamarin, over 1.4 million developers were using Xamarin's products in 120 countries around the world as of April 2017. Read more...

ASP.NET AJAX, formerly called Atlas, is a set of extensions to ASP.NET developed by Microsoft for implementing Ajax functionality. It is released under the Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL). Read more...

Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) is a Microsoft technology that provides an API, an in-process workflow engine, and a rehostable designer to implement long-running processes as workflows within .NET applications. The current version of WF was released as part of the .NET Framework version 4.5 and is referred to as (WF45).

A workflow, as defined here, is a series of distinct programming steps or phases. Each step is modeled in WF as an Activity. The .NET Framework provides a library of activities (such as WriteLine, an activity that writes text to the console or other form of output). Custom activities can also be developed for additional functionality. Activities can be assembled visually into workflows using the Workflow Designer, a design surface that runs within Visual Studio. The designer can also be hosted in other applications. Read more...

ClickOnce is a component of Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 and later, and supports deploying applications made with Windows Forms or Windows Presentation Foundation. It is similar to Java Web Start for the Java Platform or Zero Install for Linux. Read more...

The .NET Foundation is an organization incorporated on March 31, 2014, by Microsoft to improve open-source software development and collaboration around the .NET Framework. It was launched at the annual Build 2014 conference held by Microsoft. The foundation is license-agnostic, and projects that come to the foundation are free to choose any open-source license, as defined by the Open Source Initiative (OSI). The foundation uses GitHub to host the open-source projects it manages.

The foundation began with twenty-four projects under its stewardship including .NET Compiler Platform ("Roslyn") and the ASP.NET family of open-source projects, both open-sourced by Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. (MS Open Tech). Xamarin contributed six of its projects including the open source email libraries MimeKit and MailKit. , it is the steward of thirty-six projects, including: .NET Core, Entity Framework (EF), Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF), Umbraco, MSBuild, NuGet, Orchard CMS and WorldWide Telescope. Many of these projects are also listed under Outercurve Foundation project galleries. Read more...