MCS Society.NET Tech Talk Series Thursday, November 7 th, 2002 What is.NET? Michael Dunn Drexel University Student Ambassador to Microsoft

Topics Introduction Basics Myths The technology –Language Independence –Operating System Independence –Platform Independence Conclusions

Introduction First in a series of.NET Technical Talks sponsored by Drexel’s Math and Computer Science Society. High level overview of.NET Future talks include much lower level discussion Please hold detailed questions till the end

Basics (cont.) The motivation behind designing.NET was to enable easy creation of web services. C# and the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) are now international standards. Many highly successful brand name companies are early adopters of.NET

Basics (cont.) Honeywell GlaxoSmithKline Bank of New York Accenture KPMG Scandinavian Airlines System Carnival Cruise Lines Credit Suisse First Boston Hewlett Packard Deutsche Bank Hitachi, Ltd. The Virgin Group USDA Coca-Cola Company FleetBoston Financial Continental Airlines Verizon Xerox Fidesic Expedia MSNBC NASDAQ Zagat Survey

Basics (cont.)

Myths.NET is yet another attempt by Microsoft to shut down Open Source.NET is a Microsoft technology.NET only works with Microsoft Windows.NET costs a lot of money By using.NET I am supporting Microsoft

The technology Key concepts: –Language Independence –Operating System Independence –Platform Independence

The technology (cont.) Operating System Common Language Runtime.NET Framework (Base Class Library) Web Services and XML Console and GUIs Common Language Specification VBC++C#PerlPython

The technology (cont.) : Language Independence Ada APL AsmL Basic (VB) C# C C++ CAML (F#) COBOL Component Pascal ECMAScript (JScript) Eiffel Forth Fortran (2) Haskell lcc Java (J#) Mondrian ML Mercury Oberon Oz Pascal Perl Python Scheme SmallTalk for more info.

The technology (cont.) : Operating System Independence Despite being designed by Microsoft,.NET was not created with one operating system in mind. A “shared source” CLI (SSCLI - codenamed ROTOR) is available for porting.

The technology (cont.) : Operating System Independence (cont.) Ximian – “Mono” GNU’s – “dotGNU” Since its an open standard, anyone can implement.NET for any operating system.

The technology (cont.) : Platform Independence Intermediate Language (IL) is converted into machine instructions by the CLR The CLR is part of the open standard, and can be implemented for just about any system architecture

Conclusions.NET is (r)evolutionary.NET is not a be all end all solution for every programming project Just as (C++ != AT&T) && (Java != Sun) (.NET != Microsoft) Lots of exciting.NET services to come!