Microsoft's .NET Technology
Latest and greatest platform for building applications. All Microsoft's products are being re-written using the .NET platform, and many companies are now doing their
new software developments in .NET. Notably, the investment banking sector (with
whom Storm do a lot of work) are currently making this transition.
The business driver for adopting .NET appears to be that C# offers the benefits
of RAD (rapid application development) with the performance, style and reliability
of Java. It doesn't match the performance of C++, but provides interop layers to
allow calls to high-performance 'un-managed' modules, thus giving the best of both
worlds.
Interestingly, the incentive for firms to migrate from Visual Basic to VB.NET is
less obvious, since the former has always been one of the best RAD environments
available. Traditional VB developers have found the migration to OO (object-oriented)
programming difficult too, with the majority of VB.NET developers largely ignoring
the fact that their new language is now 100% OO.
However, the 'killer app' that .NET has introduced to all is ASP.NET. ASP.NET is
a Web server based, .NET platform which allows developers to very easily create
Web services and dynamic Web sites. Initially released in 2002, ASP.NET has set
a new standard for ease of development and performance for server-side, dynamic
Web content. The 2005 version (.NET 2) makes Web site development even easier, with
developers needing to write even fewer lines of code for certain tasks.
Microsoft's SQL Server 2005 Relational database is .NET and XML compatible.