I would like to know if any of the members into one or of these techs. I have been working with ASP for a while and have been reading about .Net for the last two months. Mainly my interest is focused on developing web applications with ASP.Net.

So, if there's anybody of you who's into such stuff let me know so we can help the others to get exposed to them.

Well they are interesting indeed, though I didnt get a chance myself to learn more about them. How about you start with some information about them and probably along other members who are familiar with it can add something.

Is this a question or an answer? I guess that .Net has more to do than can be stated even by Microsoft itself.

The .Net was found in the first place as a marketing strategy against Sun's Java. Microsoft wasn't satisfied by following Sun with its Visual J++. Therefore, invested heavily in developing a competing technology that can beat Java.

This led to cross-roads. Three years ago .Net was a marketing, today its a reality. The first outcomes were C# (C-Sharp), ADO+, ASP+ and some minor changes to the COM technology of Microsoft that was used as its counter-part CORBA in Java 1 then RMI in Java later editions.

All of these techs. were together put into whats called the .Net Framework. MS Visual Basic lacked mainly being a full Object Oriented Programming Language, therefore Microsoft came up with VB.Net, fully Object Oriented Programming Language. Moreover, it didn’t limit it to VB.Net; it extended its inspiration to other languages including the enhanced version called Visual C++ .Net and Visual J#.

What Microsoft promotes through its Visual Studio.Net Product is inter-operability. What does this mean is that you can develop your applications in your favorite language and can still share it with your fellows on whatever language they use (as far as I know only the languages that come with V-Studio.Net can be used to develop .Net applications. However you can develop .Net applications with PERL, PHP as I have read somewhere). This is done through whats called the Common Language Runtime (CLR). Data-types across all the .Net Languages are unified, so that there are no conflicts when using source codes developed using another .Net Language. (Unified in this sense means that data-types mean that String, Integer etc are inherited from the same base class. Also, the source-code is first compiled into Microsoft Intermediate Language (MSIL) then converted into the native code using the CLR. This approach follows Java’s way where the code is converted into “Bytecode” then Java Virtual Machine interprets it when its executed).

All these languages make use of two main technologies that make .Net more valuable to any developer which are XML Webservices, and ADO.Net.

XML Webservices in a very simple definition is “a way of exposing part of your application to the external world in a very sophisticated way that doesn’t even require the others run the same platform or use the same technology that you used to develop it”. With webservices you can use protocols such as SOAP, XML, or even HTTP (GET-Post) to exchange data between applications.

On the other hand, ADO.Net was born for the Internet-age where data are used in a disconnected nature. Furthermore, ADO.Net is very efficient when it comes to sharing data across the Internet. You can write a small web service that makes use of ADO.Net in extracting data from your database in an XML format and make it accessible for your fellows who are in need for it. In addition to that, ADO.Net has a feature that’s called Dataset that can let you make in-memory copy of your server database by extracting the required information from the database. This enables you to work with the database as if you are working a live copy of it by including the database structure, relationships, constraints, etc… When you are done, you can push the update button and things get updated easily with an update-conflict resolution mechanism.

ASP.Net comes at the top of it by using the underlying technologies in building web-based applications that provide not only convince for the end-users but even flexibility and efficiency for the developers themselves. Too many obstacles that are only known to web-developers are no more. Server Controls, View-State, and Session Management are just few life savers to name.

Windows 2003 Server Operating Server was developed to provide state-of-art mechanism in managing enterprise applications such as the ones developed .Net technologies. (No more information yet as I have just installed the evaluation kit of Windows 2003 Server).

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Thanks to cool_dude who added the list of programming languages that can be used to develop .Net applications
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.Net support.

APL
Fortran
Pascal
C++
Haskell
Perl
C#
Java Language
Python
COBOL
Microsoft JScript®
RPG
Component Pascal
Mercury
Scheme
Curriculum
Mondrian
SmallTalk
Eiffel
Oberon
Standard ML
Forth
Oz
Microsoft Visual Basic®

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Disclaimer: The above information have not being audited for technical nor for language typos.