What Is .Net - An Overview

Microsoft has been heavily touting their new technology they are calling ".Net" (pronounced "Dot Net"). Many people have asked me what this is and how it will affect them as a small business online. To be blunt, it won't affect you in the near future. Like any new technology, it will take a little time to catch on. Note, however, that it may catch on faster than it would otherwise because it has the Microsoft media machine backing it.

Logging on to Microsoft.com and click to the .Net Home site, you'll find a lot of propaganda about this technology. Much of the information contained there is meant for programmers, developers, and other technical people. I'll try to translate some of that jargon into layman's terms and explain what this technology is in a nutshell.

.Net is not a single program or programming language. It is really a set of protocols for connecting information between people, systems, and devices. Compare it to the written language. This article is written in American English, which allows anyone who can read English to read it. The language is a go-between that transfers my thoughts to yours. Much like this, .Net will be a go-between for information being transported between one piece of software and another.

For an individual or business, this may have great implications in the future. Currently, for one piece of software to interact with another, both makers of each piece of software have to agree on a medium or information type. We have few standards in place for this type of interactivity. A good example of this sort of thing in practice, from current technology, is the web browser. Whether you use Netscape, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Opera, or any other browser, web pages all basically look the same. This is because pages are built using a standard called HTML (HyperText Markup Language).

Another standard for information exchange appeared in the mid-nineties and began realizing its potential quickly. XML (eXtensible Markup Language) is the building block for Microsoft's .Net technology.

Let's use a business example of how .Net may change the way you do business online. Let's say you have a website with a shopping cart, credit card gateway, and a merchant account. Now lets assume that your credit card gateway has become too big for their britches and has raised their transfer rates to process credit cards for you. You're ready to switch, but this could be a costly proposition: requiring you to change shopping cart software, re-input your inventory, or even rebuild your entire website.

Now put .Net in the picture. If the technology works as promised and your website was using it, the changeover would be easy. All you would have to do is find the gateway you want to use, make sure they are ".Net Ready" and make a few administrative changes to your current shopping cart. This could mean the difference between spending a hundred and spending a thousand dollars for a fix.

Although this example doesn't cover all of the intricacies involved in this type of transaction, it should give you an inkling of what .Net could do if it is implemented correctly. A more expanded example is given on the Microsoft .Net website. This example cites the use of a handheld device, a PC, and a web server all working in concert to distribute information between employees, managers, and others.

Again, .Net will have to become widespread and commonly used for this type of thing to realistically happen. Many technologies that promised similar things in the past have failed to do so - the WAP standard is a good example. Despite this, one other technology which was similar in scope to .Net and which has been called its number one competitor is Java. Microsoft, to "compete" with Java, has created C# which is basically their version of Java. If you look at it, .Net is really an extension of other, existing technologies including Java and XML. .Net, however, has the advantage of being backed by Microsoft and because of this it will be an integral part of most or all of Microsoft's current standards and programming languages.

.Net is also a type of managed hosting. This means that your website itself will probably not hold the information that .Net uses, but will ask for the information from another server or web host. At first, this was very dubious since it appeared that only Microsoft would be the host for this type of interchange.

That changed recently when Microsoft announced that it would be licensing rights to anyone who wanted them. This will open up the technology and allow consumers to have better trust in the use of it. It also allows for information diversity so that you won't have all of your data in one place and won't lose it or be shut down temporarily due to technical problems.

In short, .Net is a promising new technology that may be useful down the road, but is not something that you need to worry learning too much about in the near future. Leave that to technophiles and programmers. You should be aware, though, of its potential and that eventually your business (and any business online) will be affected by it in some way.

By Aaron Turpen of Aaronz WebWorkz

About the Author

Aaron Turpen is the proprieter of Aaronz WebWorkz, a full-service provider of Web needs to small businesses.

aaron@aaronzwebworkz.com
http://www.aaronzwebworkz.com