Website:http://www.microsoft.com/ Software Provider: Microsoft, Inc. Current Version: .Net Framework 3.5 service pack 1 Operating Systems: Windows 98, ME, 2000, XP, Vista, Server 2003, Server 2008 License: Microsoft EULA
New language features in C# 3.0 and VB.NET 9.0 compiler
Adds support for expression trees and lambda methods
Extension methods
Expression trees to represent high-level source code at runtime.
Anonymous types with static type inference
Language Integrated Query (LINQ) along with its various providers
LINQ to Objects
LINQ to XML
LINQ to SQL
Paging support for ADO.NET
ADO.NET synchronization API to synchronize local caches and server side datastores
Asynchronous network I/O API .
Peer-to-peer networking stack, including a managed PNRP resolver
Managed wrappers for Windows Management Instrumentation and Active Directory APIs
Enhanced WCF and WF runtimes, which let WCF work with POX and JSON data, and also expose WF workflows as WCF services. WCF services can be made stateful using the WF persistence model.
Support for HTTP pipelining and syndication feeds.
ASP.NET AJAX is included
New System.CodeDom namespace.
Source: Wikipedia
About:
The .NET Framework created by Microsoft is a software development platform focused on rapid application development (RAD), platform independence and network transparency. .NET is Microsoft's strategic initiative for server and desktop development for the next decade. According to Microsoft, .NET includes many technologies that are designed to facilitate rapid development of Internet and intranet applications.
.NET has brought new functionalities and tools to the application programming interface (API). These innovations allow programmers to develop applications for both Windows and the web as well as components and services (web services). .NET provides a new reflective, object-oriented API. .NET is designed to be sufficiently generic that many different high-level languages can be compiled. The .NET framework is a competing product to Sun's Java and J2EE technology and it shares many concepts with it.
There is a collection of development tools specifically developed for use with the .NET platform. The principal example is Visual Studio .NET, an integrated development environment from Microsoft.