Commentary: What the heck is .NET?

Journal Record, The (Oklahoma City), May 13, 2002 by Mark Towler

Have you seen the recent crop of Microsoft commercials that show off people using cool technology to run their businesses better? There is the young couple choosing a color for their new car while the factory where the car is made automatically adjusts the production line. Another shows a wine broker instantaneously making changes to the costs on his inventory of wine after a forklift accident.

These commercials all end with the tag line: "one degree of separation?" If you've seen those ads, you may be wondering just what the heck .NET is anyway. To understand .NET, you'll first need to strip away any preconceived notions that Microsoft is nothing more than a great big public relations and advertising engine pushing yet another product. Strip away the media blitz and at the heart of .NET lies technology that will help midsized companies use the Internet in ways well beyond simply having a Web site. Microsoft's Web site says: "Microsoft .NET is a set of Microsoft software technologies for connecting your world of information, people, systems, and devices. It enables an unprecedented level of software integration through the use of XML Web services: small, discrete, building-block applications that connect to each other - as well as to other, larger applications - via the Internet." The definition above mentions XML, which stands for eXtensible Markup Language. The short and sweet explanation of XML is that's it an open standard that is managed by the World Wide Consortium (not Microsoft) that makes it much easier to share data across disparate systems. So, what does .NET mean and why is this important? In order to answer that, let's look at things from a historical perspective. More often than not, different departments within a company use different software to support their functional part of the business. The human resource department uses one software application to track employee information such as payroll and benefits. Accounting may use different software to deal with invoices, receivables and payables. Sales may use yet another system for tracking client data. Getting these enterprise applications within one company to interact with one another and exchange data has always been a challenge. Now, think about what has happened with technology in the last five to 10 years. The Internet provides a means of connecting companies and individuals all over the world. Today, the challenge isn't just to connect your own applications together. Now you also need to connect your customers' systems to your system, your suppliers to your system. Not only that, but beyond the existing hardware and software you've had to support, now you've got to think about wireless and portable devices. Complex? You bet. Thus, we have .NET. .NET is not one piece of software. It's a suite of Microsoft products that together, allow software developers to easily build programs that work together seamlessly. Using the XML standards as guidelines, developers can program in non-Microsoft tools and .NET allows information to be "translated" and shared even if the source of that information does not reside inside a Microsoft product. Let me give you an example of how a local firm has used the .NET framework to streamline communications and avoid "translation" problems. The Oklahoma Student Loan Authority facilitates student loan processing between students, educational institutions and lending sources. Facilitating sometimes meant manually handling electronic files of student loan information from trading partners to get the information into their own internal system. Using .NET tools, we recently helped the Oklahoma Student Loan Authority develop a system that can receive data from any number of electronic sources and process it in their internal systems. The authority then returns data to the proper receiving organization in the appropriate format. The system helps reduce response time and overhead, while helping to ensure the quality of data and giving Oklahoma Student Loan Authority a scalable solution to grow with. Meta Group, a national technology research firm, estimates that by 2004, 30 percent of enterprise application development projects will be built using the .NET framework. That's a 30 percent market penetration in less than three years. Let's face it - some people think Microsoft is the Evil Empire and that the Microsoft hype machine is guilty of generating massive hype well in advance of a useful product. Others drink the Microsoft Kool-Aid, are unabashed champions of their products and swear allegiance to the company no matter what. Here's my take: Back in the early '90s, I was working for a company developing software for the Macintosh when Windows 1.0 was released. No one bought it. Later Windows 2.0 was released and everyone in my company ridiculed such a sloppy attempt at mimicking the wonderful Mac interface. Then came Windows 3.0 and the snickering started to die down a bit. I think you know where this is going. Microsoft didn't get it right the first time out. They didn't get it right the second time out. The third time wasn't that much better. But today, if you use a personal computer, there's a 90 percent chance you're running a version of Microsoft Windows. The bottom line: When Microsoft focuses on a market, they eventually succeed. The amount of effort they are putting behind the .NET framework and the very real benefits organizations can realize from deploying these technologies suggest that you should pay attention to more than just the ads.