.NET or .NOT as I like to call it is meant to be middle-ware essentially. Things that are similar would be, as has already been mentioned, Sun's WSDL framework (Also IBM's implementation), Apache's raft of products but especially Apache Cocoon. These things, sometimes called middle-ware, sometimes called Web Services are essentially meant to provide a non-platform specific way of negotiating with disparate systems, clients, databases etc..... It's about data re-use, centralised data (Transcoding) and collaboration amongst other things. XML features very heavily in all of this, often used as the semantic glue that binds it all together. In that case of Apache, Sun and IBM this glue is often made sense of by the use of Java. Hence we have J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) and M$.NOT.
M$.NOT does not use Standards, they've invented their own. Such as c# (C Sharp, which is a poor rip-off of Java, but hey they OWN it right), f# (F Sharp) and now surprise, surprise x# (X Sharp). M$.NOT is a big pile of shit. Again M$ thinks re-inventing the wheel is a good thing. M$.NOT was what was responsible for that Music site that was trying to to compete against itunes, but didn't work. M$.NOT doesn't work.
What part of STANDARDS doesn't M$ and his Billness understand I wonder.
These sorts of platforms are in terms of the web on the cutting (bleeding) edge, yet again we see an M$ that sticks out as odd, you know what it has nothing to do with them "innovative" or great but everything to do with them being utter shit and third rate.
Oh and yet once again M$ were not first. That would be Sun and IBM.
Also there is an Open Source implementation of .NET called MONO, personally I don't see the point of this and it's bound to be tainted with M$ thinking.
MONO PROJECT[ September 30, 2003: Message edited by: Zardoz ]