Understanding the .NET Ecosystem

Hello everyone and welcome to another informative blog!

Today I will explaining what .NET is and what all can we build from it. As it is easily confused and many at times  misunderstood by people who have just entered the world of frameworks and app development.So let me start by giving a big picture of .NET to get you started with using this.

.NET is a platform to build almost anything!

Meaning it has a runtime, libraries, languages to enable you to build basically any app on any platform ranging from desktop, web, mobile, etc.

The reason why people are often confused is that .NET in the past few years has gone through a plethora of changes, having many new iterations and names.

So there were a bunch of different ways on how .NET could be used:

Until now .NET was very segmented and had .NET framework which was used to develop windows desktop apps, .NET Core is a newer open-source implementation and is cross-platform and finally Xamarin is the framework which is also a .NET implementation but used for mobile app development.

Now all this is being combined to one single SDK (Software Development Kit), one BCL (Base Class Library) and a unified tooling. It will be launching on November 2020 for everyone and is completely open source on GitHub.

Thus we have a basic idea that .NET is a big ecosystem which has capability to build anything and everywhere. Now this consists of:

1. Languages – C#, F#, VB
2. Runtime – Common language runtime
3. CLI – Dotnet CLI
4. Libraries – Base class libraries and 3rd party available through Nuget

So we write our code in either C# or F# language. This code needs to be complied in a runtime (similar to Java Virtual Machine), we have CLR to run the code. Then to build we need a command line interface (CLI), dotnet CLI is used. And finally to shorten the code, we have millions of libraries which can be found from Nuget package manager just like the npm or maven we have for Javascript and Java respectively.

Now you have a basic idea of what are the possibilities of learning .NET platform, want to get started?

Just open https://dotnet.microsoft.com/ and hit download.

You will need to install the SDK (Software Development Kit) for the operating system you are using. After that just open the command line (cmd for windows and terminal for MacOS or Linux) and type dotnet new

You will be given a long list of options which are boilerplate to understand how .NET can be used to start the particular application.

With this I hope you might have got a basic idea as to how .net can help you create an app or a website based on your requirements.

Thank you!!