dotNET ... in the beginning

Hi there, I think there is some major confusion and also apprehension from GIS developers on using dotNet … this is also a major issue among ESRI ArcObject programmers. Let’s face it … dotNet is not going away … its here to stay and Microsoft Windows is installed in almost all o/s installations. Now with Vista on the way… its gonna be an exciting year for dotNet developers.

If you read my earlier blogs … I did mention about the older programming languages and also how ESRI development was done before (i.e. from AML, Avenue, VB6, VC++, Java and now dotNet)

The brain behind ANY dotNET development is the .NET Framework. The .NET Framework is a managed type-safe environment for application development and execution. The .NET Framework manages all aspects of your program’s execution.

The .NET Framework consists of two main components:

• common language runtime
• .NET Framework class library

Common Language Runtime is also called CLR…this is the actual engine that runs your code. It can be thought of as the environment that manages code execution. It provides core services, such as code compilation, memory allocation, thread management, and garbage collection. Through the common type system (CTS), it enforces strict type-safety and ensures that code is executed in a safe environment by also enforcing code access security.

The .NET Framework class library is actually what we use to develop applications. They contain classes, methods and objects that we import into our code. It provides a collection of useful and reusable types that are designed to integrate with the common language runtime. When we start programming... we call classes from the class library to begin coding.

An example is Integer or Int is from the .NET Framework class library... and we access them through namespaces.

Visual Basic .NET
Dim myInteger As Integer

Visual C#
int myInteger;