The .NET platform appeared in the early 2000s. She combined several programming languages ”under one roof”, which was new for that time. But the developers of the platform argued that this innovation was of undoubted benefit: programmers began to create their applications in those languages that they knew best, that were best suited for solving their problems.
Another innovation in the .NET platform was the Active Server Page (ASP.NET) technology. With its help, it was possible to develop relatively quickly web applications that interact with databases. An important feature of ASP.NET was considered the ability to use the full power of object-oriented programming for web development. Applications written using this technology have better performance and security. At least that’s what Microsoft engineers believed.
It is difficult to overestimate the role of such an innovation as web services. .NET provided tools for developers to use them. Programmers were able to implement interaction with web services in any language of the .NET platform.
However, the overly tight integration of ASP.NET with Windows IIS made it impossible to use an alternative web server for hosting applications. These circumstances have attracted more and more criticism from the developer community over time and were an unfavorable factor for the development of ASP.NET MVC.
Visual interface design – Web Forms, Windows Forms, then WPF – is also a significant achievement for developers. Now this may seem ridiculous to someone, but then a quality tool for creating a GUI was new.
In addition to the classic implementation of the platform, the .NET Compact Framework (a version of the .NET Framework designed to run applications on devices based on the Windows CE platform.) And the .NET Micro Framework (an implementation of the Microsoft .NET platform for embedded use in 32- and 64- bit microcontrollers).
The .NET platform has changed over time. If initially it was released as a toolkit for users of the Windows operating system, then later the developers went to meet the fans of other operating systems. So, for example, the Mono project appeared in the open source community, which was officially recognized as an implementation of .NET on Unix-like operating systems.
