Over the past decade, the application development industry has undergone many transformations. We’ve seen the migration of large green-screen mainframe applications to Win32 client-server applications, as well as the introduction and evolution of tiered web application development. Over the past few years, we’ve also seen the introduction of new and exciting technologies that focus on integrating applications regardless of the platform and programming language they were developed with. Using web services, a technology based on standard transport protocols and data formats such as SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) and XML, we can now make platform-independent remote procedure calls (RPCs) over the Internet.
If you’ve ever tried to build a web application, you’re painfully aware of the complexities associated with tiered, stateless web development. Creating these types of web applications, while not rocket science, has been and continues to be time-consuming and tedious with traditional development tools. Microsoft .NET is Microsoft’s next-generation development platform designed to make developing standards-based and Win32 web applications much easier for the developer. It is a radically new way of looking at code development that allows developers to create applications that can exchange data using both traditional and standards-based transport protocols. Some of the new enhancements include the .NET Framework, Common Language Runtime (CLR), Web Services, ASP.NET, and ADO.NET. Visual Studio.
It is now obvious that .NET introduces many new features, including new form factors such as Web Forms and Win Forms, and new technologies such as Web Services and ADO.NET, the next version of ADO. In fact, there are so many new enhancements that it is impossible to cover them all. Therefore, we are going to narrow our focus to the concepts needed to create a managed component. Specifically, this chapter introduces the Common Language Runtime (CLR), .NET Framework, and .NET COM+ services, now known as .NET Enterprise Services.