Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Wed 20th Feb 2002 18:45 UTC
A lot of people have trouble understanding what .NET really is and what its goals are. Mostly because Microsoft has done a good job of confusing everybody using terms that are not self-explanatory or with terms that mean more that one thing. This editorial will present my thoughts on .NET, what it really is, what its motivations and goals are, and why it is the next "big thing." Should we embrace it or fear it? Both, I daresay.
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The .NET Framework is not really a wrapper for Win32. You can write plain vanilla command-line programs using .Net. The basic framework provides classes for things like strings, I/O objects, networking, XML, etc. This is the first part that they're implementing with Mono. This is also all part of the ECMA standard.
If you want to write a GUI app, then you use the Windows.Forms interface. Now this part *is* a wrapper for Win32. Actually, it's really more of a new API that happens to be implemented in C, using Win32. There's no reason it couldn't be implemented using some other underlying API, for example, GTK on Linux, which is what Ximian has planned.
By the way, the Win32 API is not a wrapper around C functions. Win32 *is* a bunch of C functions. MFC is the C++ wrapper you're thinking of that is a wrapper around Win32. MFC is crap, and should be completely killed off by .Net.