.NET for IT professionals
With it's powerful programming languages and XML-based interoperability, Microsoft .NET is so often perceived as being the domain of developers. But .NET is a pervasive mix of technologies that extends right around a business - so it's important to IT professionals too.
29 June 2004
Many people - even IT people - think of .NET as a ‘product’. This is forgivable, since many of Microsoft’s communications seem to refer to it in this way too. .NET is rather hard to define. It is a product - or at least a framework of products - that are held together by a strategy. So .NET isn’t just a means of developing systems - it is systems.
(In fact .NET isn’t a development tool at all - though it contains a choice of development tools, such as Visual Basic .NET and the preferred development option, C#.)
.NET saw Microsoft bring many of its products together under a single strategy. That strategy had been there before, but the .NET brand gave it stronger impetus. The strategy is really based around connected technology - systems working together regardless of what and where those systems are: or, described with a reduction in marketing-speak: ‘Web services’.
The drive towards .NET was one born of need. Businesses were Web-enabling services anyway, but the technology available was pretty limited. HTML was never designed to be used to create something like Amazon, for instance, so developers and businesses had to either create technologies to do the job, or kludge technologies together.
.NET was built from the ground up with the Web, e-business and the 21st century in mind. .NET enables developers to create powerful systems, which interoperate in a trusted manner. .NET uses standard Internet protocols, such as XML, SOAP, Web Services Description Language (WSDL) and Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI).
Not surprisingly, much of Microsoft’s communications around .NET has been targeted at the developer - after all, if developers weren’t developing .NET systems, the .NET strategy (which puts many of Microsoft’s eggs in one basket) would be dead in the water. Also targeted have been business managers - people who would benefit from .NET systems. Left slightly out of the loop has been the IT professional, as if these systems were somehow different from the Windows Server 2003/Exchange Server combinations that we know and love.
Actually, .NET is something that all IT professionals should get their heads around. .NET is Microsoft’s major strategy and almost all of the companies align to it in one way or another. Not only will these interoperating systems/Web services need developing, they’ll also need deploying, managing, supporting, maintaining and extending. They’ll be the backbone on which many businesses will be run.
There’s good reason for this. .NET systems can be developed faster than using legacy tools. They’re more robust. Far more functional. More easily extended. More future-proof. More secure. All of this is good news to the IT professional.
It’s worth noting a few technical advantages of .NET. Although .NET uses shared components (similar to DLLs) it allows ‘side by side’ deployment of different versions of the same component - and each can be executed, at the same time, by different applications. This is in sharp contrast to the ‘DLL hell’ which used to pervade systems - caused by developers altering, and then automatically installed a standard component, which was fine for their system but stopped others working! .NET applications are self-contained and can be easily copied from one system to another - there’s no need to be dependent on the registry, so applications can be installed, updated and removed very easily. .NET also interoperates very readily with other languages and platforms - after all that’s what it was designed to do.
It’s also very secure - with security built into the technology rather than being added after. Finally, it supports many devices - meaning that .NET systems can extend easily beyond the browser to handhelds, smartphones - and whatever else the boffins cook up.
No longer the new kid on the block, .NET is being deployed worldwide on many major (and not so major) systems - it’s going to be the central plank of many companies’ IT strategy for some years to come.
So not only do developers need to embrace the .NET vision, IT professionals need to as well, if they are to deliver, support and maintain the kinds of services and IT infrastructure needed in the 21st century.
