Architecture Explanation!!

Common Language Specification:

To fully communicate with other objects regardless of the language they were implemented in, objects must expose to callers only those features that are common to all the languages they must interoperate with. For this reason, the Common Language Specification (CLS) is needed. CLS is a set of basic language features needed by many applications, has been defined. The CLS rules are defined a subset of the common type system; that is, all the rules that apply to the common type system apply to the CLS. The CLS helps enhance and ensure language interoperability in the form of defining a set of features that developer can rely on to be available in a wide variety of languages. The CLS also establishes requirements for CLS compliance;

                             If the component uses CLS features in the API, this component is surely accessible from any programming language. The CLS was designed in such a way that it includes the language constructs that are needed by developers.

Applications and Services:

Console Based Applications: A console Based Application is a text-based application. Rather than displaying a GUI, it uses a command-line interface. Mainly we use the console based applications in developing utility programs where a min input with maximum output is required. We don’t develop a console based application for end-users.

Example of Console based Application is “Compiler”.

Windows Applications: A windows based application uses a Graphical User Interface rather than a Command –Line interface.

Example of windows application:  Microsoft Office 2010.

Windows Services: Windows services are applications without any user interface, running in background of our O.S. These applications can use identity of a preconfigured user, even though the currently logged in user can be different.

ASP.Net Web Applications: ASP.NET is a framework used for developing web applications including websites and web services.ASP.NET is a collection of web forms.

ASP.Net Web Services: A Web Service is programmable application logic accessible via standard Web protocols. One of these Web protocols is the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). It uses standards based technologies (XML for data description and HTTP for transport) to encode and transmit application data. Web services are state less.

Remoting Applications: .NET Remoting enables you to build widely distributed applications easily, whether application components are all on one computer or spread out across the entire world. You can build client applications that use objects in other processes on the same computer or on any other computer that is reachable over its network .NET Remoting provides an abstract approach to interprocess communication that separates the remotable object from a specific client or server application domain and from a specific mechanism of communication. As a result, it is flexible and easily customizable. You can replace one communication protocol with another or one serialization format with another without recompiling the client or the server.

Mobile/Smart Device Applications: We can develop large number of applications for hand-held devices. As the future is full of accessing any service by any device, anytime, anywhere, this Smart device application is going to play an important role.

Data Access (ADO.NET and XML):

ADO.NET: If you are designing a data access layer for a .NET-based application, you should use Microsoft ADO.NET as the data access model. ADO.NET is feature rich and supports the data access requirements of loosely coupled, multitier Web applications and Web services. As with other feature-rich object models, ADO.NET offers a number of ways to solve a particular problem.

XML: XML was designed to describe structured data. It’s a markup language similar to Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). Both XML and HTML are subsets of Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML).Unlike HTML, XML tags are not predefined. You make up your own unlimited set of tags. This is why it is extensible. XML is a meta-markup language (i.e. it conveys information about itself) so it is self-describing. Since you make up your own tags, XML uses a Document Type Definition to describe its data to applications that use it. XML was designed to describe data and focus on what the data is. HTML was designed to display data and focus on how the data looks. XML data can be viewed in a browser or it can be passed to other applications for processing and viewing.

Base Class Libraries:

               The Base Class Library (BCL) is a standard library available to all languages using the .NET Framework.  .NET includes the BCL in order to encapsulate a large number of common functions, such as file reading and writing, graphic rendering, database interaction, and XML document manipulation, which makes the programmer's job easier. It is much larger in scope than standard libraries for most other languages, including C++, and is comparable in scope to the standard libraries of Java. The BCL is sometimes incorrectly referred to as the Framework Class Library (FCL), which is a superset including the Microsoft.* namespaces.

Common Language Runtime:

Common Language Runtime (CLR) is the engine available in .Net Framework to compile and run the program. CLR engine does not compile the code in machine code but converts the code in a set of instructions called Microsoft Intermediate Language (MSIL). This MSIL is one of the section of Portable Executable (PE) file, the other being Metadata. PE file automatically get generated when you compile the program code. The conversion of the program code to MSIL by CLR engine makes .Net platform and language independent.