What is Microsoft.NET platform?
Microsoft .NET is a software development platform based on virtual machine based architecture. Dot net is designed from the scratch to support programming language independent application development. The entire .NET programs are independent of any particular operating system and physical hardware machine. They can run on any physical machine, running any operating system that contains the implementation of .NET Framework. The core component of the .NET framework is its Common Language Runtime (CLR), which provides the abstraction of execution environment (Physical machine and Operating System) and manages the overall execution of any of the .NET based program.
With dot NET, Microsoft introduces a completely new architecture for Windows applications (WinForm), Data Access (ADO.NET), Web Applications (ASP.NET), Windows components (Assemblies), Distributed Applications (.NET remoting), and above all the XML based Web Services.
What is the .net framework?
The .NET framework is a collection of all the tools and utilities required to execute the .NET managed applications on a particular platform. The MS.NET framework includes the standard compilers (C#, VB.NET, J#, C++.NET, Jscript.NET), various utilities like (caspol, ngen, installutil, tlbimp, sn, asmreg, ildasm, etc), runtime environment (CLR), garbage collector, security manager, thread manager, assembly loader, just in time compilers, and the standard framework or base class libraries. It is important to realize that while the implementation of .Net applications is platform independent; the implementation of .NET framework is platform specific. In fact, it is this particular specific implementation of the .NET framework that makes the managed .NET applications platform independent.
What is a .Net Assembly?
The .NET assembly is the standard for components developed with the Microsoft.NET. Dot NET assemblies may or may not be executable, i.e., they might exist as the executable (.exe) file or dynamic link library (DLL) file. All the .NET assemblies contain the definition of types, versioning information for the type, meta-data, and manifest. The designers of .NET have worked a lot on the component (assembly) resolution.
There are two kind of assemblies in .NET; private and shared. Private assemblies are simple and copied with each calling assemblies in the calling assemblies folder. Shared assemblies (also called strong named assemblies) are copied to a single location (usually the Global assembly cache). For all calling assemblies within the same application, the same copy of the shared assembly is used from its original location. Hence, shared assemblies are not copied in the private folders of each calling assembly. Each shared assembly has a four part name including its face name, version, public key token and culture information. The public key token and version information makes it almost impossible for two different assemblies with the same name or for two similar assemblies with different version to mix with each other.
An assembly can be a single file or it may consist of the multiple files. In case of multi-file, there is one master module containing the manifest while other assemblies exist as non-manifest modules. A module in .NET is a sub part of a multi-file .NET assembly. Assembly is one of the most interesting and extremely useful areas of .NET architecture along with reflections and attributes, but unfortunately very few people take interest in learning such theoretical looking topics.
