Subtitles of the Movie

Now let's talk about the somewhat simple question just what exactly is the .NET Framework? Now in a different video I talked about what is ASP.NET and the bottom line is that the .NET Framework is ASP.NET's daddy, if you will. ASP.NET is a sub-set or a portion of the .NET Framework. Now the .NET Framework is simply a Software Development-Operational Environment. It is the programming structure and it's the programming neighborhood that we're going to live and work in when we're building Microsoft's Operating Systems, or Microsoft Windows type applications. Now if you go back to the way applications used to be built, we were in like the VB6 world, or the C++ world, all of our applications lived and breathed on local machines, there was very little networking involved, even when that started it was a private network that we trusted. We knew for sure that other machines were on the other end and we could hit them instantly and that sort of thing. If we didn't hit them instantly it created a trouble ticket and the guys in trouble support would fix the network and then our application would work. The advent of the Internet changed all that because now we began working across networks that we couldn't maintain and we couldn't guarantee what was on the other side. So the .NET Framework was where Microsoft went back to the drawing board and said OK, how do we need to build applications now and, how does the computer behave now? And as you can see on the screen here, it just happened to magically appear just at the right time, that .NET Framework is based on Web standards and practices, and then we're talking about TCP IP-based for the Networking, we're talking about HTTP protocols, HTML and all that sort of stuff. So the bottom line is, if it's a Web standard and practice then it's kind of built into the .NET Framework. Now, if you go out there and look at standards enough you know there's enough wiggle room to argue and fight over quite a few things. But for the most part you're going to find the .NET Framework is based on those standards. Now, in reality the .NET Framework is really a collection of Class Libraries and then different functionalities to support the environment that the code from these libraries run in. The Class Libraries is a bunch of pre-compiled code that I can instantiate and even extend and change and use. Now, if you know what a Class is, if you're familiar with object-oriented development and you know what a Class is, then a light just came on. They have a bunch of libraries out there. For example, if I want to do something across a TCP IP Network and I actually want to control what's on that Network I don't have to understand a whole lot about it. I can simply use, there's a Class out there in system.network or something. io,. tcpip and Microsoft has already coded that. I just simply have to instantiate an object, pass it certain parameters, call certain methods and I can manually manipulate tcpip and manually manipulate the network and speak to the machine. So that's the Class Libraries. And these are just pre-coded solutions to problems. Now what's really interesting about these, there's another part of the .NET Framework and that is the environment that all this runs in. You have a common language runtime, you have a pretty massive robust security system and sub-system, so I don't want to skip all that but I don't want to go too deeply right here, but for the most part you're going to see as we work through ASP.NET that the Class Libraries that we use, for example in dealing with SQL Server, or with Session Objects and that sort of thing, are organized into hierarchical namespaces, and every bit of this is extensible. Microsoft freely shows you the vast majority of this code and you can add your own functionalities to it. That's outside the scope of this course and we won't really go there, but you can go out and dig. Now, the .NET Framework is Language Independent. You can use pretty much any language that you've ever used with the .NET Framework. We won't get into that, just go read some information on the .NET Framework. There's a lot of information on Microsoft's site and I'm going to show you in a minute how to get to some documentation on this. Then, there are some common namespaces. I just want to show you some of these. For example, there is a namespace called System.Windows.Forms and in this all of the pre-coded Classes that you can use to manipulate forms, like in a Windows Desktop environment. Then there's System Collections and so if I want to see all of the buttons on a form then I can look through System.Collections. I can use that Class to read a collection on an object. System.Data - we will use this one in this course. The System.Data is the collection of classes that have to do with working with data, connecting to databases, reading databases, storing things in databases, and under that you'll see other nested namespaces. I'll show you some other examples, for example, System.Web. In the System.Web namespace we have all the Classes for programming in ASP.NET, or this is part of the ASP.NET namespaces. Now, nested under that is System.Web.UI and the System.Web gives us access to fix things as HTML, HTTP and so forth. System.Web.UI is what lets us drop controls on pages and do all that kind of stuff and WebControls are the specific web controls that Microsoft built. Now the documentation, once you install the .NET Framework on a machine you will have documentation there and you can get this free from Microsoft's Web site and in a later video we'll actually go through some of the documentation on the .NET Framework, so that's just a quick run through on the .NET Framework. If you're brand new to this I would strongly encourage you to grab a book or go out on the Internet and do some searches and just read about the .NET Framework. It'll help you understand what's going on here. But it's not in any way a pre-requisite for being able to do what we're going to do with ASP.NET here.