recent there is .NET thingy? what is the .NET programming all about, like MS VISUAL STUDIO .NET, can someone explain in details and its history???? M Nguyen

Sounds like a homework assignment to me... at anyrate, here is a link full of resources: http://archive.devx.com/dotnet/resources/

You guys opposed to helping a guy out with homework? anyways .net is a bit old as far as i know i personally havn't used it but from what i gather its C# and such

.NET is basically just Microsoft's latests revision of it's IDE, as well as programming languages (such as C#) that run using the .NET framework. I have no problem helping somebody with homework when they at least start the assignment and give it a shot themselves. There are way too many examples of people who simply post the assignment verbatim as it appears in the textbook and expect someone here to do it for them. Check this out. You'll see that many others here feel the same way.

Before .NET Microsoft's programming languages were used to build executables (.exe's) that were very platform and operating system dependent. .NET is Microsofts attempt to make its programs platform independent. All Microsoft Visual Studio languages have been modified to output the same intermediate language. This intermediate language can be compiled and linked at run time on whatever platform and operating system Microsoft decides to support in the future. In theory at some future time Visual C++, Visual Basic, C#, etc. code could even run on a Mac or UNIX platform. All it will take is a compiler/linker that will take the intermediate language code and produce a native executable. This has little benefit on code that will only run on one computer. The greatest benefit will be for client/server and other applications that can potentially run on different platforms.

No, no problems with helping students with homework. Afterall, that is why most of us are here - to help. However, I expect the student to make a valid effort first... Here is why... IR

I broke the link while posting it... check it out in Dr. Nick's post above. IR