The branding is really awful, yeah. .NET in its broadest sense is Microsoft's home-grown programming stack. This includes a runtime (the 'Common Language Runtim

The branding is really awful, yeah. .NET in its broadest sense is Microsoft's home-grown programming stack. This includes a runtime (the 'Common Language Runtime') which different languages target. The big one is C# but there's also F# and a few weird experiments which didn't pan out. It all started with '.NET Framework', which was the old Windows-only implementation. Eventually they rewrote everything to be cross-platform and called it '.NET Core'. Distinguishing between the two was confusing, so MS took the genius decision of rebranding it all as just '.NET'. So today you can make a project in .NET 5, .NET 6, .NET 7, etc., and they're all cross-plat. Various frameworks exist on top of .NET. The biggest one is ASP.NET Core, the web framework. And there's frameworks on top of that like Blazor. The runtime is JIT by default, but you do actually have AOT options nowadays, which is nice.