Introduction

.NET technology was introduced by Microsoft, to catch the market from the SUN's Java. Few years back, Microsoft had only VC++ and VB to compete with Java, but Java was catching the market very fast. With the world depending more and more the Internet/Web and java related tools becoming the best choice for the web applications, Microsoft seemed to be loosing the battle. Thousands of programmers moved to java from VC++ and VB. This was alarming for Microsoft and many of the Microsoft fan's kept on asking "is Microsoft sleeping?". And Microsoft had the answer. One fine morning, they announced : "We are not sleeping. We have the answer for you.". And that answer was .NET.

But Microsoft has a wonderful history of starting late but catching up quickly. This is true in case of .NET too. Microsoft put their best men at work for a secret project called Next Generation Windows Services (NGWS)., under the direct supervision of Mr. Bill Gates. The outcome of the project is what we now know as .NET. Even though .NET has borrowed most of it's ideas from Sun's J2EE, it has really outperformed their competitors.

What Is .Net

• It is a platform neutral framework.
• Is a layer between the operating system and the programming language.
• It supports many programming languages, including VB.NET, C# etc.
• .NET provides a common set of class libraries, which can be accessed from any .NET based programming language. There will not be separate set of classes and libraries for each language. If you know any one .NET language, you can write code in any .NET language!!
• In future versions of Windows, .NET will be freely distributed as part of operating system and users will never have to install .NET separately.
• .NET is not an operating system.
• .NET is not a programming language.

Namespaces in .NET

A Namespace is a group of related classes. It is a good practice to group related classes into a namespace when you create a class library.

Here is the importance of 'namespace'. You can refer to the .NET Form using the fully qualified name, including the namespace like this :

System.Windows.Forms.Form

And you can refer to your own Form like this :

MyApplication.Form, where MyApplication is your namespace.

All classes in .NET class library are grouped into namespaces. You can use all the classes using the fully qualified name, including the namespace also along with the class name.

• System.Windows.Forms.Form
• System.String
• System.Double