Microsoft Visual Studio Express is a set of integrated development environments (IDEs) developed by Microsoft as a freeware and registerware function-limited version of the non-free Microsoft Visual Studio. Express editions started with Visual Studio 2005.

Visual Studio Express was supplanted by the Visual Studio Community edition, which is also available for free. but with different license. Compared to Visual Studio Express, the new license is more friendly to open-source but less for some closed source developers. The community edition works with plugins, a feature that was previously exclusive to the paid editions (Professional and higher). Express editions of Visual Studio 2015 are, however, still available for the time being. A final version was released in 2017. Read more...

The Microsoft .NET strategy is a 2000s software development and marketing plan of Microsoft Corporation. Steve Ballmer described it as the company's "most ambitious undertaking since Internet Strategy Day in 1995". In support of this strategy, between 2000 and 2002, Microsoft released ".NET" branded updates to its works, including Visual Studio .NET, Visual Basic .NET, .NET Passport, .NET My Services, .NET Framework, ASP.NET and ADO.NET. A Windows .NET Server was also announced. Microsoft had plans to include Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Exchange Server and MSN into this strategy.

By 2003, however, the .NET strategy had dwindled into a failed branding campaign because the brand had failed to articulate what Microsoft had in mind in the first place. As such, Windows .NET Server was released under the title of Windows Server 2003. Since then, Visual Studio and .NET Passport have been stripped of ".NET" in their brandings. However, Microsoft and the rest of the computing industry use ".NET" to indicate close association with .NET Framework, e.g. .NET Compiler Platform, .NET Foundation and .NET Reflector. Read more...

Entity Framework (EF) is an open source object-relational mapping (ORM) framework for ADO.NET. It was a part of .NET Framework, but since Entity framework version 6 it is separated from .NET framework. Read more...

Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) is a Microsoft software framework for building identity-aware applications. It provides APIs for building ASP.NET or WCF based security token services as well as tools for building claims-aware and federation capable applications.

Windows Identity Foundation is supported on IIS 6/Windows Server 2003, IIS 7/Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7. Version 1.0 shipped as a standalone product, but the product is now included as a part of Microsoft .NET Framework v4.5. Read more...

Microsoft XNA (a recursive acronym for XNA's not acronymed) is a freeware set of tools with a managed runtime environment provided by Microsoft that facilitates video game development and management. XNA is based on the .NET Framework, with versions that run on Windows NT, Windows Phone and the Xbox 360. XNA content is built with the XNA Game Studio, and played using the XNA Framework (for Windows games), or published as native executables (for Xbox 360, Windows Phone and Zune).

In many respects, XNA can be thought of as a .NET analog to Microsoft's better known game development system, DirectX, but it is aimed at developers primarily interested in writing lightweight games that run on a variety of Microsoft platforms. XNA is the basic platform for Xbox Live Indie Games. Read more...

Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) is a component of .NET Framework 4.0 aiming to create lightweight, extensible applications. It aims to allow .NET application developers to discover and use extensions with no configuration required. It also aims to let extension developers encapsulate code easily and avoid fragile hard dependencies. Furthermore, it aims to allow extensions to be reused across applications. MEF was introduced as a part of .NET 4.0 and Silverlight 4. Read more...

Parallel Extensions was the development name for a managed concurrency library developed by a collaboration between Microsoft Research and the CLR team at Microsoft. The library was released in version 4.0 of the .NET Framework. It is composed of two parts: Parallel LINQ (PLINQ) and Task Parallel Library (TPL). 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. Read more...

.NET Reflector is a class browser, decompiler and static analyzer for software created with .NET Framework, originally written by Lutz Roeder. MSDN Magazine named it as one of the Ten Must-Have utilities for developers, and Scott Hanselman listed it as part of his "Big Ten Life and Work-Changing Utilities". Read more...

Microsoft Visual Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) from Microsoft. It is used to develop computer programs, as well as websites, web apps, web services and mobile apps. Visual Studio uses Microsoft software development platforms such as Windows API, Windows Forms, Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows Store and Microsoft Silverlight. It can produce both native code and managed code.

Visual Studio includes a code editor supporting IntelliSense (the code completion component) as well as code refactoring. The integrated debugger works both as a source-level debugger and a machine-level debugger. Other built-in tools include a code profiler, forms designer for building GUI applications, web designer, class designer, and database schema designer. It accepts plug-ins that enhance the functionality at almost every level—including adding support for source control systems (like Subversion and Git) and adding new toolsets like editors and visual designers for domain-specific languages or toolsets for other aspects of the software development lifecycle (like the Team Foundation Server client: Team Explorer). Read more...

ASP.NET is an open-source server-side web application framework designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. It was developed by Microsoft to allow programmers to build dynamic web sites, web applications and web services.

It was first released in January 2002 with version 1.0 of the .NET Framework, and is the successor to Microsoft's Active Server Pages (ASP) technology. ASP.NET is built on the Common Language Runtime (CLR), allowing programmers to write ASP.NET code using any supported .NET language. The ASP.NET SOAP extension framework allows ASP.NET components to process SOAP messages. Read more...

.NET Remoting is a Microsoft application programming interface (API) for interprocess communication released in 2002 with the 1.0 version of .NET Framework. It is one in a series of Microsoft technologies that began in 1990 with the first version of Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) for 16-bit Windows. Intermediate steps in the development of these technologies were Component Object Model (COM) released in 1993 and updated in 1995 as COM-95, Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM), released in 1997 (and renamed Active X), and COM+ with its Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS), released in 2000. It is now superseded by Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), which is part of the .NET Framework 3.0.

Like its family members and similar technologies such as Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) and Java's remote method invocation (RMI), .NET Remoting is complex, yet its essence is straightforward. With the assistance of operating system and network agents, a client process sends a message to a server process and receives a reply. Read more...

MonoDevelop (also known as Xamarin Studio) is an open-source integrated development environment for Linux, macOS, and Windows. Its primary focus is development of projects that use Mono and .NET frameworks. MonoDevelop integrates features similar to those of NetBeans and Microsoft Visual Studio, such as automatic code completion, source control, a graphical user interface (GUI) and Web designer. MonoDevelop integrates a Gtk# GUI designer called Stetic. It supports
Boo,
C,
C++,
C#,
CIL,
D,
F#,
Java,
Oxygene,
Vala, JavaScript, TypeScript
and Visual Basic.NET.

MonoDevelop can be used on Windows, macOS and Linux. Officially supported Linux distributions include CentOS, Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Ubuntu, with many other distributions providing their own unofficial builds of MonoDevelop in their repositories. macOS and Windows have been officially supported since version 2.2. Read more...

Microsoft Blend for Visual Studio (formerly Microsoft Expression Blend) is a user interface design tool developed and sold by Microsoft for creating graphical interfaces for web and desktop applications that blend the features of these two types of applications. It is an interactive, WYSIWYG front-end for designing XAML-based interfaces for Windows Presentation Foundation, Silverlight and UWP applications. It was one of the applications in the Microsoft Expression Studio suite before that suite was discontinued.

Expression Blend supports the WPF text engine with advanced OpenType typography and ClearType, vector-based 2D widgets, and 3D widgets with hardware acceleration via DirectX. Read more...

The Common Language Runtime (CLR), the virtual machine component of Microsoft's .NET framework, manages the execution of .NET programs. Just-in-time compilation converts the managed code (compiled intermediate language code), into machine instructions which are then executed on the CPU of the computer. The CLR provides additional services including memory management, type safety, exception handling, garbage collection, security and thread management. All programs written for the .NET framework, regardless of programming language, are executed by the CLR. All versions of the .NET framework include CLR. The CLR team was started June 13, 1998.

CLR implements the Virtual Execution System (VES) as defined in the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) standard, initially developed by Microsoft itself. A public standard defines the Common Language Infrastructure specification. Read more...

.NET Compiler Platform, also known by its nickname Roslyn, is a set of open-source compilers and code analysis APIs for C# and Visual Basic .NET languages from Microsoft.

The project notably includes self-hosting versions of the C# and VB.NET compilers – compilers written in the languages themselves. The compilers are available via the traditional command-line programs but also as APIs available natively from within .NET code. Roslyn exposes modules for syntactic (lexical) analysis of code, semantic analysis, dynamic compilation to CIL, and code emission. Read more...

SharpDevelop (also styled as #develop) is a free and open source integrated development environment (IDE) for the .NET Framework, Mono, Gtk# and Glade# platforms. It supports development in C#, Visual Basic .NET, Boo, F#, IronPython and IronRuby programming languages.

It was designed as a free and lightweight alternative to Microsoft Visual Studio, and contains an equivalent feature for almost every essential Visual Studio Express feature, including features for project management, code editing, application compiling and debugging. To allow for easy project migration, SharpDevelop works natively with Visual Studio project and code files. It is able to compile applications for .NET Framework version 2.0, 3.0, 3.5, 4.0, 4.5.1 and the .NET Compact Framework 2.0 and 3.5. Read more...

Windows Forms (WinForms) is a graphical (GUI) class library included as a part of Microsoft .NET Framework or Mono Framework, providing a platform to write rich client applications for desktop, laptop, and tablet PCs. While it is seen as a replacement for the earlier and more complex C++ based Microsoft Foundation Class Library, it does not offer a comparable paradigm and only acts as a platform for the user interface tier in a multi-tier solution.

At the Microsoft Connect event on December 4, 2018, Microsoft announced releasing Windows Forms as open source project on GitHub. It is released under the MIT License. With this release, Windows Forms has become available for projects targeting the .NET Core framework. However, the framework is still available only on the Windows platform and Mono's incomplete implementation of WinForms remains the only cross-platform implementation. Read more...

The Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), previously known as Indigo, is a runtime and a set of APIs in the .NET Framework for building connected, service-oriented applications. Read more...

ClickOnce is a component of Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 and later, and supports deploying applications made with Windows Forms or Windows Presentation Foundation. It is similar to Java Web Start for the Java Platform or Zero Install for Linux. Read more...

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is a graphical subsystem by Microsoft for rendering user interfaces in Windows-based applications. WPF, previously known as "Avalon", was initially released as part of .NET Framework 3.0 in 2006. WPF uses DirectX and attempts to provide a consistent programming model for building applications. It separates the user interface from business logic, and resembles similar XML-oriented object models, such as those implemented in XUL and SVG.

WPF employs XAML, an XML-based language, to define and link various interface elements. WPF applications can be deployed as standalone desktop programs or hosted as an embedded object in a website. WPF aims to unify a number of common user interface elements, such as 2D/3D rendering, fixed and adaptive documents, typography, vector graphics, runtime animation, and pre-rendered media. These elements can then be linked and manipulated based on various events, user interactions, and data bindings. Read more...