Custom Software Technologies

As a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, Entrance Software has a wealth of experience developing applications with Microsoft technologies. Our software experts are skilled in building custom software applications in components of the .NET Framework. Contact us today to discuss your .NET development needs.

Microsoft .NET Framework

The .NET Framework, developed by Microsoft, is a platform that is used by software developers to create new applications for Windows. It consists of a Class Library and a runtime environment called the Common Language Runtime (CLR).

The Class Library is a collection of pre-coded solutions to a variety of programming problems that a developer may face when designing an application. These solutions cover topics in web application development, user interface, database connectivity and network communications among others. Programmers use pieces of code from the library together with their own code to write software applications.

The purpose of the CLR is to provide a virtual environment so that the programmer does not have to consider the capacity of a specific CPU that will implement the software application. In addition, the CLR offers memory management, exception handling and security. There are four parts of the CLR:

Common Type System (CTS)
Common Language Specification (CLS)
Metadata
Virtual Execution System (VES)

Design features of the .NET Framework include:

Interoperability
Common runtime engine
Language independence
Base class library
Simplified deployment
Security
Portability

Development of the .NET Framework began in the late 1990s and the beta version was released in 2000. .NET Framework Version 1.0 was released in 2002 and there have been four subsequent versions released with the latest, version 3.5, released in late 2007. The .NET Framework is included with Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista, but can be installed on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.