This explains it much more concisely yet thoroughly than anybody could in a post here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.NET_Framework https://en.wikipedia.org/wi

This explains it much more concisely yet thoroughly than anybody could in a post here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.NET_Framework https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.NET_Framework It's a (in theory) OS-neutral platform. It's a huge software stack with many different languages on top of it, all of which target a VM (in the Java sense, not the VMWare sense) that makes it theoretically platform-independent. It allows the different languages to share a common standard library, and that standard library is vast. That being said, my impression is that most people who write code for the .NET platform use C# to do so. It's been around for almost 15 years now [!]. I can't believe it's been that long.