In our IT industry, Microsoft has done a Tehelka by introducing a whole new platform called .NET. In today’s article we will try to understand what is .NET, what all new features will be given to us by .NET. I am starting the article by giving an overview of the practical aspects of the software development life cycle with Microsoft technologies.
First (Presentation) Tier
This involves the graphical user interface and is managed by front ends such as Visual Basic. For internet applications it can be HTML, XML. Creating an user friendly environment is the key issue with the presentation layer.

Second(application) Tier
This layer processes the information. This layer gets distributed into number of sub layers to reduce complexity of code. So this middle tier is a complex layer having responsibility of writing the main business logic and communicating with other two layers.

Third(Database) Tier
This layer stores the information which we have collected in presentation layer and processed in middle layer. This is a database layer.

Currently Microsoft provides softwares for all the layers. The Obvious question is then why . NET?

Following are the main reasons

1. The major reason is compatibility. Even though we can generate all components here, compatibility between any two components is a big problem. Versions of different tools and operating system add a level of complexity to these problems.
2. ASP code for large applications becomes too bulky to manage, and in an era of object oriented programming going back to scripting for large applications is not desirable.
3. There is a dependency on the operating system / platform, which makes deployment on other operating systems/platforms very difficult.

According to Jim Farley, author of many books in Java, assessment of .NET is like the fable of the three blind men attempting to identify an elephant: It's perceived as very different things, depending on your perspective. Some see .NET as Microsoft's next-generation Visual Studio development environment. Some see it as yet another new programming language (C#). Some see it as a new data-exchange and messaging framework, based on XML and SOAP. In reality, .NET wants to be all of these things, and a bit more

1. Some development tools require additional files to be installed on the client to execute the developed programs. E.g.. VB requires the file VbrunXXX.dll to run the developed files. To overcome the problem, .NET comes with the solution called Common Language Run Time (CLR). It works like this
   1. Development tools will compile the code to Intermediate Language (IL or MSIL). So code written in either VB.net, ASP.net or C# can be generated to its IL
   2. CLR will execute this code with the help of Just in time compiler.