Subtitles of the Movie

Well I guess the best place to start on the subject, especially one as large as this is at the beginning. So, let's ask a fundamental question. What is .NET? Why do we need it? .NET is a new development platform for Microsoft. It's where Microsoft is betting their future. What has happened is over the last few months and years with the advent of the Internet and its expansion has changed network communications, is changed the way that our applications act and interact with each other. We have now left the world with the small local area network for application's set safely in a private network most of the time, and we have gone to a more of an Internet based or a wide area network based environment. This has changed the way that we need to get our information, the way we interact with our servers and databases and our clients. And this is Microsoft's answer. Microsoft simply went back to square one and said - wait a minute. For the way we are using 'Apps' now, for the way we are building them, how do we need to be building, developing software. And this .NET is the answer. It's based on industry Internet standards, you'll hear things like XML, Soap and so forth. And those standards are there. This is another somewhat of a departure for Microsoft. We're now based on a lot of industry standards. It is XML based; now XML you keep hearing a lot about it. We are going to touch on it briefly, but I would strongly encourage you, now to stop wasting those hours between midnight and four every night - right! And begin to read up on XML, but XML is the basis for .NET, we'll touch on that a little bit later. .NET is an initiative, it's not just a little bit of a programming language thing. Understand this is an entire complete platform change from Microsoft, they are offering three basic portions of this. Or there's three areas in which .NET is being targeted. Number one's development tools. We are going to play with the major one, which is visual studio dot seven in this course. You'll see it and you are going to like it, they did some really cool things. Microsoft really listened to the development world out there. They've paid attention. They did some really neat things with this development environment. The backend on this for management are the .NET servers and these things are just becoming identifiable, people are beginning to use them and play with them, and these are just server environment operating systems based on the .NET initiative. We won't get into those in this course. And then of course the rich user experience that .NET brings to the user. Templicity, a lot more functionality and we'll talk about those issues as we go through here. Next thing you are going to notice, we have a departure in .NET from com issues. OK we no longer need to write component object model type code. We don't have to wrap our objects in any com code to make them interact with each other, and we don't have to manage and clean up after our components and objects like we used to, we don't have nearly as many opportunities here for memory leaks, over used connections and running out of connections. And we'll talk about that as we get there. So once again in English, OK here's the basics. Number one this is a development platform. An initiative that is XML based, which simply means it is platform independent. Now you are going to notice, and a lot of people are noticing similarities between .NET and Java. Because .NET and Java both are trying to get to the point what we write code once, so we really don't care what language we write it in. It gets compiled down and runs on any CPU or any platform so that's what we are headed here. And you are going to notice .NET does it and does it really nicely. Also, and please don't laugh, this is easy. If you've got experience with VB6 or any other programming languages, especially if you are a C person or a Java person this will be easy for you. If you've never been there, you are still going to find out that this is incredibly easy. The Framework classes are doing a lot of hard work for you in the background and all you have to get acclimated to doing is calling those and manipulating the methods and properties and so forth in those. .NET the big news builds on your previous knowledge and experience. If you are a former VB6, you have not been wasting your time learning that stuff. If you have VB6 experience, you are about 80% of the way there on .NET, that's good news. Now upcoming enhancements, I want to bring these to your attention. At the time I am making these videos there is a .NET Framework 1.1, it's in beta. Now, we are currently on .NET Framework 1.0, but I didn't want you to get this video and buy this and think - Wait a minute. I'm looking at old stuff. - I can tell you that the .NET Framework 1.1, releases currently in beta and it does offer some new features to .NET, but this is not a major upgrade. There is not anything in the .NET 1.1 beta release that is going to change anything that you learn in this video. As a matter of fact, the things that you are going to see in this video are going to stay standard for quite a while. They are fundamental and basic to .NET and to object oriented programming. So don't panic when you see that come out. You are going to see a lot of incremental releases of .NET. A little bit of reading that I've done on the beta 1.1 release, dealing with code security and some other issues that we are not going to address directly in this video anyway. So, just wanted you to know about that, you'll see a lot of these, keep up to speed on these things, go to Microsoft's website and stay up to up to beat on these things. Next video, we are going to talk about some direct information for former VB6 users. And kind of help you guys understand basically what's changed here and begin to get you oriented into .NET world. So we'll take a look at that in the next video.