What is .NET?

A collection of many parts and people that together create a powerful environment
for building applications.

.NET is an ecosystem for application development

The term ecosystem describes the multiple facets of an application development

environment and the community that surrounds it. These facets combine to create a
compelling reason to invest in learning .NET and building .NET applications.

Use .NET languages and compilers to run applications in the .NET runtime

Software developers use .NET languages like C# and F# to write source code. Each
line of code they write expresses an instruction or command the computer should
perform while the program is running.

Before software developers can run their code, they must first compile it. The .NET
compiler is a program that converts the source code into a special language called
intermediate language (IL). The .NET compiler saves the IL code into a file called
a .NET assembly. By compiling the code into an "intermediate" format, you can use
the same code base regardless of where you run the code, whether on Windows or
Linux, or on 32-bit or 64-bit computer hardware.