Introduction

The .NET Framework is just part of Microsoft s overall .NET platform strategy. The framework is made up of the Common Language Runtime environment, Base Class Library, and higher-level frameworks such as ASP.NET and Windows Forms as shown in Figure 2.1.

Figure 2.1: The .NET Framework Architecture

The complete documentation on the .NET Framework fills entire books. What we do here is cover the basics so that you have a firm enough understanding of the .NET Framework to enable you to get started developing XML Web Services.

We ll start with how to obtain the .NET Framework SDK. The minimum system requirements can be confusing so we ll cover those in some detail. The common language runtime (CLR) is the foundation that sits on top of the Windows operating system. Since this is the most important part of the .NET Framework we ll spend most of our time going through the CLR. The base class library is a set of hundreds of classes that are provided as part of the framework to help us build applications that will execute in the CLR. We ll get an overview of these so that we can get an idea of the breadth of support provided by the SDK out of the box . To make building applications even easier Microsoft provides some higher level frameworks like ASP.NET and Windows Forms that utilize and extend the functionality provided by the Base Class Library. ASP.NET greatly simplifies the building of Internet applications by using Web Forms and Web Services. Windows...