What is.NET?

Here is the official double-talk and hype from Microsoft:

• Introduction to .NET

At one time it may have been something specific, and perhaps in certain specific contexts it still is. As one fellow warned me, it has sort of become used as a marketing "label". So we have .NET, .NET core, .NET ASP, .NET T-shirts, .NET coffee cups, and .NET plastered on banners in sports arenas. People are excited, but they don't really know what they are excited about.

Part of the problem is that people in the Microsoft world swim in .NET everyday and to them, .NET is just "computing" and ther isn't anything beyond that. So what sense does it make to even talk about it? To them it is like asking, "what is air?". Actually a great question for a chemist or physicist, but not for your average man on the street.

OK then, so what is .NET?

.NET is a set of libraries that are shared by languages and software in the Microsoft-Windows ecosystem. I make the analogy of the JVM (the Java virtual machine) in the world of Java. Just like you can't run a Java program without the JVM, you can't run (as an example) a C# program without having .NET (sometimes called "dotnet" because you can run a .NET utility with that name from the command line). A big (or maybe not big, but important) part of .NET is the CLR (common language runtime), which near as I can tell is the engine that runs IL (intermediate language) along with quite a few libraries.

But as I say, this is a working definition as I am exploring C# in particular.

Flavors of .NET (and Jargon)

.NET Core began as a Mono collaboration, but that came unglued. "Core" is a cross platform runtime and is the plan for the future. Note that not all libraries in Core are cross platform.

.NET Standard is a defined cross platform subset, not an implementation

• Reddit: Framework vs Core
• SO: .NET xyz vs abc
• .NET vs .NET core