Enforcing Complex Business Data Rules with WPF
Application Compatibility and Deployment, Managed Extensibility Framework, Parallel Computing

The .NET Framework is an integral Windows component that supports building and running desktop applications and Web services. It provides a managed execution environment, simplified development and deployment, and support for a wide variety of programming languages. Two key components are the common language runtime (CLR), which manages memory, code execution, and other system services, and the .NET Framework class library, which is a collection of reusable types you can use to develop your applications. The .NET Framework also includes technologies such as ADO.NET, ASP.NET, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF). For information about the key features of the .NET Framework, see the overview.

This section of the MSDN Library contains documentation for all versions of the .NET Framework that are currently available. The documentation for each version includes an extensive class library reference, conceptual overviews, step-by-step procedures, and code examples.

Secure, Multi-Language Development Platform

Developers and IT professionals can count on .NET as a powerful and robust software development technology that provides the security advancements, management tools, and updates you need to build, test, and deploy highly reliable and secure software. .NET provides a multi-language development platform, so you can work in the programming language you prefer. The Common Language Runtime (CLR) provides support for powerful, static languages like Visual Basic© and Visual C#©, and the advent of the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) means that dynamic languages, such as Managed Jscript, IronRuby and IronPython, are also supported.

The .NET Compact Framework is a hardware-independent environment that supports building and running managed applications on resource-constrained computing devices. The .NET Compact Framework inherits the full .NET Framework architecture of the common language runtime and managed code execution, supports a subset of the .NET Framework class library, and contains classes designed exclusively for the .NET Compact Framework.

The .NET Micro Framework provides support for smaller devices as a new part of the entire .NET offering. You can now extend uniformly from very small devices to servers to the cloud using the same programming model and tool chain throughout. Small devices are increasingly part of larger solutions and now with .NET, there is no need to maintain separate staff and resources for the device-related portions of your projects. .NET provides the productivity and standardization that can greatly reduce your time to market. The .NET Micro Framework was built from the start as a solution for the embedded space, so it brings the power of modern computing with the low-level access that is needed to get the job done.

Mission-Critical Business Processes

With .NET, developers can use Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) to model a business process with code, enabling closer collaboration between developers and business process owners, and providing end users with better access to data, thereby improving productivity.