.NET is the Microsoft Web services strategy to connect information, people, systems, and devices through software. Integrated across the Microsoft platform, .NET technology provides the ability to quickly build, deploy, manage, and use connected, security-enhanced solutions with Web services. .NET-connected solutions enable businesses to integrate their systems more rapidly and in a more agile manner and help them realize the promise of information anytime, anywhere, on any device. The Microsoft platform includes everything a business needs to develop and deploy a Web service-connected IT architecture: servers to host Web services, development tools to create them, applications to use them, and a worldwide network of more than 35,000 Microsoft Certified Partner organizations to provide any help you need.

• What Are Web Services? If you ask a developer what Web services are, you'll hear something like, "self-describing software modules, semantically encapsulating discrete functionality, wrapped in and accessible via standard Internet communication protocols like XML and SOAP."
  But if you ask a business leader who has implemented Web service-based
  solutions, you'll get a different kind of answer. You'll hear that Web services
  are an approach that helps the business connect with its customers, partners,
  and employees. They enable the business to extend existing services to new
  customers. They help the business work more efficiently with its partners
  and suppliers. They unlock information so it can flow to every employee
  who needs it. They reduce development time and expense for new projects.
  Web services are revolutionizing how applications talk to other applications—or, more broadly, how computers talk to other computers—by providing a universal data format that lets data be easily adapted or transformed. Based on XML, the universal language of Internet data exchange, Web services can communicate across platforms and operating systems, regardless of the programming language in which the applications are written.
  
  
• The Microsoft .NET Platform: The .NET platform consists of a number of technologies that allow software developers to build Internet-based distributed systems. Individual pieces of these systems, called software components, can be built using several different programming languages and by several different organizations. Through a common set of core functionality, .NET allows these components to work reliably with each other.
  
  Microsoft's core implementation of .NET includes:
  
  
• C# (a new programming language)
• the Common Language Runtime (for support of other programming languages)
• a collection of components that provide support for networking, security, and other "base" services commonly needed in distributed applications
• Windows Forms (WinForms) and Web Forms, rich Windows user interface components
• ASP.NET, a new version of Active Server Pages
• ADO.NET, new data access objects in the tradition of the original Active Data Objects

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