Getting deeper into .NET: Part II

 
The .NET main components:
  As you can see in the next picture, the .NET framework offers a lot of features, ADO.NET, LINQ, WPF etc..
  In every new version Microsoft introduced new components, we are now going to explain every component of those components from the main version (2.0) to the latest available one (4.0).
  Framework 2.0:
  This version is the version that Microsoft built the other version on (except 4.0 that has a new engine), The basic .NET components were introduced in Framework 2.0 which are:
  1. The CLR: Already explained.
   2. The BCL: Already explained.
   3. WinForms: It’s the NET’s graphical application programming interface, it is built on the extant Windows API and some controls merely wrap underlying Windows components and allows you to develop Windows Applications (Visual Studio 2008 for example).
   4. ASP.NET: it is a web application framework that allows you to create rich and dynamic web sites and web services (Microsoft.com for example) and is the successor to the classic ASP.
   5. ADO.NET : it’s a set of components that programmers can use to access data and data services, you can connect to a database, get and set data, open and XML file and manipulate it and so on.
  Framework 3.0:
  Introduced lot of cool components.
   1. Windows Presentation Foundation: is a graphical subsystem for rendering user interfaces in Windows-based applications,Rather than relying on the older GDI subsystem, WPF utilizes DirectX so it can enables you to create a very rich desktop applications (Visual Studio 2010 and Nokia Ovi Suite for example). Very powerful and strong.
   2. Windows Communication Foundation: It’s an API that allows you to create connected and service-oriented applications, it also allows your applications  to communicate with each other.
  3. Windows Workflow Foundation: It is a Microsoft technology that provides an API, an in-process workflow engine, and a rehostable designer to implement long-running processes as workflows within .NET applications. The current version of WF was released as part of the .NET Framework version 4 and is referred to as (WF4).
  Framework 3.5:
   Data Access has being improved in this release.Introduction of ADO.NET Entity Framework, and the new LINQ.
   1. LINQ: It is a component that adds native data querying capabilities to .NET languages, you can query data sources (Databases, XML Files…) directly from your C# or VB.NET code, without the need to learn SQL or other querying language.
   2. ADO.NET Entity Framework: It is an object-relational mapping (ORM) framework that allows you to work with data as being objects.
Framework 4.0:
  Improved performance, minimized size (20Mb), and new Engine.
   1. Parallel LINQ: is a managed concurrency library being developed by a collaboration between Microsoft Research and the CLR team at Microsoft. It is composed of two parts: Parallel LINQ (PLINQ) and Task Parallel Library (TPL).^[1][2] It also consists of a set of coordination data structures (CDS) – sets of data structures used to synchronize and co-ordinate the execution of concurrent tasks.