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.NET?

Started by Moolicious Nov 21, 2003 at 7:44 PM 1 reply 650+ views

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Nov 21, 2003 at 7:44 PM

Hey, I have been learning JAVA for the past year and am slowly moving on to Visual C++, so I am very new to the C++ language. Could someone please explain to me what exactly is .NET? And what makes it so special? How does it relate to Visual C++ or doesn''t it? How much different is it from Visual Studio 6.0? I hope these questions give an indication of what I''m wanting to find out. If anyone could enlighten me on the subject I would really appreciate it, or if anyone could post a link where I could read more about it, that would be great. Thanks in advance!

Solo

Nov 22, 2003 at 12:25 AM

.Net is not unlike JAVA in that one of it''s design goals is to create portable applications. .Net compliers create MSIL which is similar to JAVA''s byte code. .Net also provides a runtime enviroment like JAVA. The idea is to have a .Net runtime for all major platforms (just like JAVA). Then developers could create an application that will run unaltered on all of them. The problem is that as of now, only Windows and one flavor of Unix (can''t remember which) actually has a runtime implementated.

Unlike JAVA, .Net is not a language, just an enviroment. There are many .Net languages available and they, do to the enviroment provided by .Net, can be used together very easily. For instance, I could create a class in C# .Net and compilne it into a library. Then use this same class in Visual Basic .Net just as easily as if it had been implemented in Visual Basic.

Visual C++ .Net allows you to create managed code in C++ (though you can still created unmanaged code). Managed code is code that compiles into MSIL and is executed by the .Net runtime.

If you''re just starting out I wouldn''t worry too much about .Net just yet. However Visual C++ .Net is worth getting. It''s much more standards compliant that Visual C++ 6.0 (well, at least the 2003 version is).

Moolicious

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