Ms .net

Having had to install MS .NET ( from Windows update site ) in order to get a recent software install HELP section to work correctly other things as far as the Internet goes seems to be working better also.

Even WindowsBBS.

I also had another program ( PrintShop 20 ) that did not work to its fullest extend without .NET. I removed said software at the time.

Is it possible that .NET is becoming a needed requirement now ?

I have no idea what it is used for or does.

BillyBob

 

Yes and no. There are some apps being written now that require it. Most don't but for those people who don't have it installed yet, it's probably only a matter of time before they'll run into something that needs it. In the last two months, I've run into two programs that needed it. Don't really remember which ones though. I know the newest version of drive image requires it. As I said, it's probably only a matter of time.

What Is .NET? You might have a look at the faq's on this page. Don't know how much you'll get out of it though.

 

Thanks Zander

I do not understand it all but I got enough out of the Link you provided to say that you may well be correct about it being just a matter of time .

BillyBob

 

BB - to distill the information in that link into a very concise form (and lose some details but non-essential ones for end users)

.Net has lots of mini-programs within it that do things a program may need to have done and that are standard enough that most programs will need some of them.

Programmers who write their own code within their own program to do these things have to spend time writing and in many cases, may not do things in the most in the most efficient manner. With .Net, all they have to do is call (run) the appropriate mini-program.

If a program is written to call a library from .Net for some function and you don't have .Net installed, the program will probably fail.

 

Thanks Newt.

The two Programs ( PrintShop ans SPY Sweeper so far ) did not actually fail. But they did not work to their fullest so I took that into consideration and figured that they might just not be working properly.

And as I mentioned before EVERYTHING seems to be working much faster and certainly smoother.

Even with my External Modem hooked up.

BillyBob

 

Another way of saying what Newt already said is to compare .NET to Java.

When writing programs you usually need to compile these - i.e package them into an executable format...
Most classic programming languages (C, C++ etc.) are compiled into a binary format directly executable by the processor type/Operating System it is supposed to run on - this allows for speedier execution but it also leaves all the dirty work to the programmer (making sure the program releases memory after it's done running is just one of these tasks - I believe this is known as garbage collection).

Programs written in Java are compiled into something between the human readable source files and the binary (computer readable) files that classic programming languages produce.
When you then execute these files they call the Java VM (virtual machine) which interprets the files and run the program... this is a slower process than the aforementioned but it has the advantage of portability... i.e. a Mac with the Java VM installed runs the same Java programs as a Windows XP or Linux/Unix PC.

.NET offers much of the same as Java*, but as a programmer it offers you a choice of programming languages to work with (C#, Visual Basic .NET, C++ .NET) which means that if you've programmed in earlier versions of VB your learning curve will be less steep. .NET also has the advantage of having many valuable libraries available (the mini programs Newt mentioned) which means that as a programmer you don't need to invent the wheel all over again - if you need your program to open files, you just call the System.FileSystem library in your program and Voila! (oversimplified but you get the point), and the same goes for such technologies as garbage collection.

*As a MS technology the portablility is limited for now... but the framework is being ported to Linux systems at the moment, don't know how it looks on the Mac side.

P.S.
BB - One reason that your programs may run better with the .NET framework is that some components of the software, but not the complete package are programmed with .NET... which means these parts have not been functional till now.