Application Framework

General information

"Application Framework" in this context refers to a set of libraries that provide standardized object-oriented classes and methods that are used to build an application, also known as "developer platform". This usage of standardized libraries enables a faster development of applications.

.NET Framework

.NET Framework is an open-source developer platform in the programming languages C#, Visual Basic and F#. It is one of the three .NET platforms developed by Microsoft, the other two being .NET Core and Xamarine/Mono (see below). .NET Framework specializes in applications that run on Windows.

Benefits of using a developer platform

Due to the provided libraries, we do not have to come up with the code for standard functionalities ourselves and can focus on the functionalities that are specific to the application we want to develop. This saves a lot of time and effort.

Having all applications use the same platform also makes it easy to understand how all of them work even if you have only been working on one of them. The uniformity enables developers to quickly adapt to another application with only little training required and facilitates problem-solving when a similar problem is encountered.

Benefits of .NET

We are making use of a .NET platform for all of our applications because of many reasons:

• it is open-source, so no need to pay anything

• the installation is easy (see below)

• it supports various kinds of applications

• it is an established platform that is considered to be secure

• it has a huge community that is continuously working on fixing, improving and expanding the platform, so we benefit from their updates, support and services

• it is used by many organizations and developers, so there is a lot of content about .NET on the web, which is especially helpful when you seek a solution for a problem

.NET Framework VS. .NET Core and Xamarine/Mono

There are in total three .NET platforms: .NET Framework, .NET Core and Xamarine/Mono.

• .NET Framework focuses on websites, services and applications on Windows

• .NET Core applications can run on Windows, Linux and macOS

• Xamarine/Mono specializes in mobile applications

We choose .NET Framework over .NET Core because all devices, and thus all applications, of this organization are running on the Windows operating systems. We choose .NET Framework over Xamarine/Mono because most of our applications are desktop applications.

Installation

.NET can be downloaded together with Visual Studio by making sure that the options "ASP.NET and web development" and ".NET desktop development" are checked under the tab "Workloads" during the installation process of Visual Studio.

If you have missed installing it together with Visual Studio, you can add them subsequently by going to the "Tools" menu of Visual Studio and selecting "Get Tools and Features" where you find the same window as the one during the installation process.