Thanks Louis: Lots of people seem to be confused by Microsoft's .NET initiative. This is largely because it's actually several initiatives rolled into one. for the purpouses of this entry I'm going to ignore web services and passport authenticiation, which, while both interesting in their own right, aren't going to strongly affect Windows itself.

The .NET framework, on the other hand, will. For those of you who don't pay attention to these things, normally (and this is simplifying things greatly) you compile code from the actual text that is typed in straight to machine code that's specific to the chip you're working with (in the case of Windows, that's largely the 386, most x86 chips after that point basically working as 386 chips with addons, or at least imitating this). .NET is different because your code actually gets compiled into what's called the Intermediate Language (IL). It's only when this IL is first run that it actually gets converted to its final form, and it then runs on top of the .NET runtime. This .NET runtime acts as a layer insulating the code from the machine it's running on (in part, anyway).