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I was having lunch recently with a colleague when he asked, “Are you still messing around with that .NET stuff?” I could tell by the tone of his voice that he—like many computer users—still viewed .NET with suspicion.

And perhaps with good reason. Purposefully kept separate from the Windows operating system, the 22MB Microsoft .NET Framework is an hour download on dialup and four minutes on broadband. For .NET developers, this extra step adds one more hurdle for a potential customer to overcome when purchasing our software.

So in this article I attempt to demystify .NET, encourage you to download the latest version of the .NET Framework so you can run the latest and greatest .NET software, and help convince Microsoft that it needs to ensure every PC user has the newest .NET.

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Tags: .NET, Bill-Gates, CLS, Common-Language-Specification, FCL, Framework-Class-Library, Microsoft, Microsoft-.NET, Visual Studio, Visual-Studio-.NET, Windows

Did you know?  You can type ASCII characters into any application.  Press and hold the Left-Alt key, then using the numeric keypad, type the four-digit decimal number for the ASCII character you want, then release the Left-Alt key.  For example, to type è, press and hold Left-Alt, then type 0232 on the numeric keypad.  When you release the Left-Alt key, è will be typed. 

Here is the world famous ASCII table:

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Tags: ASCII, ASCII-Table, Tips

The version of .NET against which you compile an application or assembly may not be the same version of .NET on which the application is currently running.  A .NET application should always be able to run on the same or newer version of .NET against which it was compiled.

This is because .NET is backward compatible.  This means that an application compiled on .NET v1.1 should run OK on .NET v2.0 and v3.0.  But an application compiled on .NET v2.0 will not run on .NET v1.1.

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You can use the following JavaScript code in a web page to determine which versions of .NET are installed on a client PC:

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