Strategies for Simplifying .NET Application Deployment

The Microsoft .NET Framework is part of the broader trend toward the adoption of composite applications by today’s enterprises. Also referred to as custom applications, Web applications, Web services, portals, or complex applications, composite applications are assembled from pre-existing services and components to enable faster deployment than applications developed from scratch, while providing greater flexibility and customization than traditional packaged and mainframe applications. By 2007, as many as 80 percent of all new enterprise applications will be developed as composite applications. Often deployed to the Web, composite applications such as those developed using the .NET Framework give companies a more cost-effective, responsive way to deliver information and services to customers. By abstracting a number of low-level functions, the .NET framework also frees developers to more rapidly deploy internal business solutions customized to the specific requirements of their employees, processes, and IT environment.

Overview of the .NET Framework Microsoft created the .NET Framework to provide a consistent, object-oriented programming environment that can be used for the development of many different types of Web-based and Windows-based applications. .NET also promotes service oriented architectures (SOA), enabling a model where applications can be built as reusable components that are shared as services across the Internet. The .NET Framework also allows developers to create applications using a number of different programming languages including Visual Basic, C#, and J#. There are two main components to the .NET Framework: the common language runtime (CLR) and the .NET Framework class library.

The CLR, the foundation of the .NET Framework, is an agent that manages code at execution time, providing a set of core services including memory and thread management, error exception handling, and remoting. It also enforces strict type checking, as well as other types of code checking to ensure accuracy and security. Any code that uses the CLR (and therefore the underlying services that the CLR provides access to) has to be compiled into an intermediate language code called Microsoft Intermediate Language (MSIL), as opposed to machine code. MSIL is a “metalanguage” in that it describes the code, enabling the CLR to provide specified services to the code. The CLR uses a “just intime compiler” to create the native code required by the system where the code is executing.