Things have moved enormously fast in the last five years. Microsoft's .NET addresses a number of challenges as people try to conduct development programs and communicate with devices at many remote locations over the Internet. It helps solve problems with security, provides architectural guidance, improves intraoperability, business to business operation, and reduces time to market. The ability to operate effectively in the modern world has been provided by increases in computer power, currently doubling every 18 months, improvements in connectivity featuring low cost broad band services, wireless services and a wide range of interactive devices. You can now use a combination cell phone and personal digital assistant (PDA) so that you can both communicate by voice and have access to your important data back at your office and Internet access, regardless of where you are.

Integration has become imperative in and between organizations and in an individual's personal network. Integration has had the problem of historically being an afterthought. It has been regarded as too hard, too expensive, too slow and too brittle. .NET provides a solution to integration problems. It is based on the Extended Markup Language (XML), uses a universal data format and outputs an intermediate language (IL) independent of other programming languages. It adapts to devices, connects senders to receivers, and provides programmable XML web servers. .NET is a follow on to earlier XML web services that implemented service interactions across the web. It provides a number of special services including Common Language Runtime and a collection of unified classes. Common Language Runtime manages running code, verifies type safety, provides garbage collection, error handling and security provisions. The unified classes include (Active Server Pages) ASP.net, (Active Data Objects) ADO.net and enterprise services. In .NET they are clustered under system, system.drawing, system.web, system.XML and other headings. Mr. Rolon provided a series of charts showing the large number of things included under these headings. Common Language Runtime supports threading so any language can use threading. It manages running code and provides memory management. Execution does not used interpreted code. .NET can do either Just In Time (JIT) compiling before immediate execution or can execute a more optimized set of compiled code. The .NET unified programming model provides consistent (Application Programming Interface) API availability regardless of the language used and programming model. .NET supports more than 30 languages, providing tools that work in multiple languages and across languages and platforms, and is simple to use.

This report does not do justice to Mr. Rolon's excellent presentation that provided a large amount of detail and examples, including demonstrations of .NET processes that demonstrated threading. Consider this article as only a sampling of the information presented. People who were familiar with web based operations (not including this writer) discussed details with him and stayed after the meeting to engage in follow-up discussions. He recommended two online sources of information:

Socalnetug.org and learningseries.net

Of course, there is much information available at www.microsoft.com/net/