Microsoft will be releasing .NET versions of existing products as part of its .NET Initiative. An important part of Microsoft's .NET Initiative is a new platform called The .NET Frameworks.
Microsoft has re-focused across its various product groups to address software development in an interconnected world. Microsoft has decided that they are going to address the Internet, head-on, from every nook and cranny of their company. So began the .NET Initiative.

The purpose of computers is to manage information. The nature of the information varies a lot from application to application, but at the core it is still all about information.
People need to create information easily. They need to move, share, and organise information flexibly. They need to know what is going on, find the latest price, and get to their movie on time. They want their shipping information to be remembered from one web site to the next. With each web site should be personalised to individual tastes as well. All of these "needs" are about the organisation and communication of information.

For all of this to happen, somebody somewhere has to write software. This isn't the software that you pick-up off the shelf and install on the computer. Half of the software required to implement all of this doesn't even run on the consumer's computer. This is called software as a service.
If your company's service deals with information or communication, then you need software as a service to serve your customer effectively. People also want these services to come from thousands of vendors, not just one. This will improve both the quality and the price of whatever it is they are buying. Additionally many of these services will have to work together seamlessly no matter who implemented them. Suddenly, the demands on the average software developer are getting pretty steep!

Imagine that you are a realtor and you want to create a website that your client can use to keep track of their home buying or selling process. Some real estate sites offer some nice features such as up-to-date listings, mortgage calculators, and the like. Now imagine that you want to integrate some more advanced features such as real-time loan-approval status. Suddenly the computer that runs your website has to communicate information with computers from the banks and credit reference agencies. This isn't an impossible problem to solve, but it gets tougher when you consider that the customer wants to choose from a selection of banks and you don't want to lose their business just because you don't support a particular bank's data-protocol.

Tough problems like these have been solved in the past by defining standards. Standards are great, but they carry with them the burden of meeting everyone's needs. This often makes their creation slow, and their implementations tedious.
If you were this realtor, what you really want are a few general-purpose standards and a development platform robust and simple enough to meet your agile business needs. Imagine that it only took your web-developer a half-day to understand and incorporate a new data interface and another half-day to test it. All of the communication details just worked. This was done without once picking up the phone and calling a developer from the bank.

This is Microsoft's .NET Initiative. Standard protocols like SOAP will make data exchange so simple that your software will be able to keep up with your business. Simple data standards like XML will expose your businesses information to anyone who needs to consume it and vice-versa. Finally, the platform that brings these features to developers in a simple, consistent, reliable, and scaleable fashion will be a major contender for the foreseeable future.
This platform is The Microsoft .NET Frameworks.

• .NET Frameworks Architecture
• .NET Frameworks Example