The Philosophy of .NET (Best web site) Every few years or
The Philosophy of .NET Every few years or so, the modern-day programmer must be willing to perform a self-inflicted knowledge transplant to stay current with the new technologies of the day. The languages (C++, Visual Basic 6.0, Java), frameworks (MFC, ATL, STL), and architectures (COM, CORBA, EJB) that were touted as the silver bullets of software development eventually become overshadowed by something better or at the very least something new. Regardless of the frustration you can feel when upgrading your internal knowledge base, it is unavoidable. The .NET platform is Microsoft s current offering within the landscape of software engineering. The point of this chapter is to lay the conceptual groundwork for the remainder of the book. It begins with a high-level discussion of a number of .NET-related topics such as assemblies, the common intermediate language (CIL), and just-in-time (JIT) compilation. In addition to previewing some key features of the C# programming language, you will also come to understand the relationship between various aspects of the .NET Framework, such as the common language runtime (CLR), the Common Type System (CTS), and the Common Language Specification (CLS). As you would hope, all of these topics are explored in further detail throughout the remainder of this text. This chapter also provides you with an overview of the functionality supplied by the .NET base class libraries, sometimes abbreviated as the BCL or alternatively as the FCL (being the Framework class libraries). Finally, this chapter investigates the language-agnostic and platform-independent nature of the .NET platform (yes it s true, .NET is not confined to the Windows operating system). Understanding the Previous State of Affairs Before examining the specifics of the .NET universe, it s helpful to consider some of the issues that motivated the genesis of Microsoft s current platform. To get in the proper mind-set, let s begin this chapter with a brief and painless history lesson to remember our roots and understand the limitations of the previous state of affairs (after all, admitting you have a problem is the first step toward finding a solution). After completing this quick tour of life as we knew it, we turn our attention to the numerous benefits provided by C# and the .NET platform. Life As a C/Win32 API Programmer Traditionally speaking, developing software for the Windows family of operating systems involved using the C programming language in conjunction with the Windows application programming interface (API). While it is true that numerous applications have been successfully created using this time-honored approach, few of us would disagree that building applications using the raw API is a complex undertaking. The first obvious problem is that C is a very terse language. C developers are forced to contend with manual memory management, ugly pointer arithmetic, and ugly syntactical constructs. Furthermore, given that C is a structured language, it lacks the benefits provided by the object-oriented 3 C H A P T E R 1
We highly recommend you visit web and email hosting services if you need stable and cheap web hosting platform for your web applications.