Can someone just brieifly try to explain to me what Microsofts .NET is? I went to Microsoft's website and read the "What is .Net" article and was still sort of befuddled. The reason i'm asking is because i need to write a 5 page informational report on Microsoft.

Any suggestions to other noteworthy microsoft topics would be appreciated. I've already covered the whole antitrust thing, as well as the acquisition of Navision.

Thanks.

As far as I know itsjust a password verification for most of Microsoft's stuff, like Hotmail, MSN Messenger, Zone...

Ralyon

Some caustic short answers might be:

• Yet another renaming/repackaging of OLE/COM/ActiveX/DCOM//MTS technology
• Yet another attempt to usurp a well established technology, change it slightly and then relaunch as their own revolutionary breakthrough (this time it is J2EE, XML and their all too numerous relatives, in particular EJB and SOAP/UDDI)
• Nobody knows yet, the least of all Gates, Allen, Balmer..., but it sounds cool

OK, seriously (though above answers have more than a grain of thuth in them): a new platform/architecture for development and deployment of multi-tier distributed applications (those where tasks like presentation, business logic, persistent data access etc are handled by various communicating components usually running on different machines - something like very generalised client/server concept). The architecture has many elements (e.g. lots of protocols (discovery, messaging, procedure/method invoking, authentication, transaction handling), servers - those that provide execution environment for components and others etc). The most 'visible' element is C# - a new Java-like language - and its abstract virtual machine, which is supposed to become computing substrate for all .NET components to run on.

I doubt this was of much use, but there's quite a number of Windows guys around here who will able to be more helpful

Cheers!

It's a superb new business opportunity for me

The amount of holes a badly set up single-sign-on solution can have is astonishing. And MS don't do things by half on the security front, so I can see lots of work ahead. The really bad side is that it is likely to take off due to MS' marketing might even though all the foundations have scary security issues.

</soapbox>

Anyway - I like penguins