Microsoft have hit back: having fallen out with Sun over Java, they have now developed a rival product. Whereas the Java technology has produced a single language that is portable across many platforms, Microsoft's .NET Framework provides a number of languages that interoperate, initially only for most varieties of Microsoft Windows.

Microsoft's Visual Studio.NET product not only makes it easy to produce code for standalone programs (such as console applications and windows forms applications) but also makes it easy to produce code that can be executed by their web server software (IIS). The latter possibility not only allows the creation of dynamically generated WWW pages, but also the ability to offer web services, i.e., to provide methods that can be called by external clients.

This document:

• considers the key aspects of the .NET Framework;
• provides an introduction to C#;
• gives some examples of some standalone programs written in C#.

The document assumes the reader has some knowledge of the Java programming language.

The use of C# to support web forms and web services are dealt with in another document ([2]).