Web Development Articles

What is .Net and Where is ASP.NET?

Stop for a moment and ask yourself how computer programs work, exactly. How does the code you write in a Visual Basic application go from that high-level programming code (i.e., MsgBox "Hello, Welcome to .Net!") to an actual running program? Classically, this has been accomplished via a compiler, which is a special program that translates the source code into a machine-specific language, such as assembly code (which is then transformed into machine code, an even lower-level language).

Assembly code and machine code, though, are very platform specific. That is, machine code written for an Intel Pentium chip won't run on any machines such as Macintoshes (more generically, they won't run on a machine that uses microprocessor whose instruction set is different that that of Intel's microprocessor's instruction set).