Learning C#

       Microsoft .Net framework is one of the world's greatest development framework developed by Microsoft. And this is a software framework for Microsoft Windows operating systems.Using .Net framework, developers can build standalone desktop applications, web applications and mobile applications. It provides lot's of class libraries to work with user interfaces, data access, database connectivity, cryptography, numerical algorithms and network communications.

       Microsoft .Net Framework supports for many programming languages therefore developers can use any language to develop their applications as they wish. Those languages are Visual C#, Visual Basic, Visual C++, Visual J#, etc… Because of that reason Microsoft .Net Framework becomes more and more popular among the software developers. Using Microsoft .Net Framework, developers can build applications very easily and fastly.

Let’s look how the compilation is done within the Microsoft .Net Framework. First developer builds the application using any .Net language like C# and developer compiles that source code using C# compiler to intermediate language (IL). If developer builds the application using VB language, he/she needs VB language compiler to compile source code to intermediate language (IL). After initial compilation, we get a complied source code with intermediate language. It is called .Net assembly. .Net assembly can be either .dll file or .exe file. By looking at the assembly file, we can’t guess the programming language which is used to develop the application because the assembly file is independent from the .Net language. Then the second compilation is done. The Common Language Runtime (CLR) which provides runtime for the .Net applications compiles the assembly file into the machine code. Machine code only contains a stream of 0’s and 1’s. Machine code is the code that the computers can understand because it only contains 0’s and 1’s. Then the machine code is executed by the computer. It means the computer executes the application. And finally user can work with the application. 

The following figure demonstrates how the .Net compilation process is done.

.Net Framework Compilation

That is some information about Microsoft .Net Framework and its compilation process. You can read more on it from Wikipedia. You are going to learn C# and now you know why we installed .net Framework to develop C# applications.