Many beginners get confused with the terminologies related to .NET. In this article, you’ll learn about the Microsoft Technologies and framework associated with .NET and its many frameworks and tools. In, February 2002, the first version of .NET framework was released. This would be the dawn of C#. Microsoft has launched programming languages like Vb, C#, F# which with C++ were now all interoperable by the .NET common runtime. The .NET has been cross platform since 2016 and open source since 2014, thus creating freedom for even more developers. It's now totally free from ARM x86 to x64.
.NET Framework
.NET Framework is a framework to build applications that run specifically on Windows systems.
- C#, C++, F++ and over 20 languages
- .NET Framework 1.0, 2002
- Visual Studio .NET
- Visual Studio Code
.NET CORE
.NET CORE is a cross-platform which enables developers to build applications, services, and websites with .NET . .NET Core doesn’t replace .NET Framework exactly.
.NET 5
.NET 5 is basically a continuation of .NET Core with more features and functionalities in .NET for unified cross-platform devices and technologies.
ASP.NET
ASP.NET was initially released in 2002 and iterated over the years and is an extension to the .NET platform which is dedicated to building web applications with various tools and libraries. It acts as the base framework to process web requests in C# and F#, has web-page templating syntax, different libraries for common web patterns for instance Model View Controller (MVC), Authentication System, and more.
ASP.NET CORE
ASP.NET Core is the newer version of ASP.NET. ASP.NET Core 2.0 is stated to be over 2X faster than the last ASP.NET versions. It is open-source and can be executed in all Operating Systems from Windows to Mac and Linux.
.NET Standard
.NET Standard defines the base class libraries that need to be implemented for a given version which is basically an API specification. It is used to implement base class libraries (BCL) which contain classes like collections, networking, I/O, exception handling, and more.
Visual Studio
Microsoft Visual Studio is a fully-featured integrated development environment (IDE) for developers across domains and expertise levels from students to enterprise-level engineers which acts as a code editor for the web apps, mobile apps, and web services development.
Visual Studio Code
Visual Studio Code is a source code editor developed by Microsoft for all Operating System platforms from Windows, macOS, and Linux and includes numerous features supporting syntax highlighting, debugging, refactoring, git operation, and many more.
Microsoft Silverlight
Microsoft Silverlight enabled interactive media experience as a freemium browser plugin extensively to enrich applications and provide an immersive mobile app experience.
Blazor
Blazor, a feature of the ASP.NET, enables developers to build interactive user interfaces for web applications by using C#. The Blazor apps consist of reusable components of Web UIs which are implemented using HTML, CSS, and C#. The server and client programs are coded in C# which allows us to share the core and the libraries.
Blazor Mobile Binding
Mobile Blazor Binding enables developers to write code for the Native UI of the apps using Blazor which can also create a user interface for the web application with Blazor. The contents, layout, and styles can be reused thus accessing rich native user interface to be developed rapidly.
Hybrid Apps
Hybrid apps are in fact the web applications that can be packaged in a native wrapper, unlike Native apps which are designed for smartphones specifically.
Xamarin
Xamarin is a platform, open-source software that allows developers to build cross-platform applications for enterprise-grade software.
This article will help novice developers and students on the path to learn and get into Microsoft Technologies trying to hone skills by starting a path into development. The .NET family has a long history of over 2 decades and all the .NET terminologies can be quite overwhelming to one who just got into this arena. So we learned what differences there are between these .NET technologies and their use cases such that you can choose the appropriate skill to learn.