Understanding .NET for Beginners

[Avichal]

I decided to explore microsoft softwares but didn't quite get it.
What is .NET and visual studio? Is it a framework to make things easier to develop or is it something more?

I till now have made C/C++ programs using vim and gcc on my ubuntu. For web I used web2py. Is .NET something like web2py (a framework) ?

Then what is ASP.NET? Why does visual studio have C#, F#, C++, Visual Basic and all these languages? Web2py only had python!

Basically I am having a tough time figuring out what actually do these softwares do!
Sorry for so many questions at once.

 

[rcgldr]

One of my coworkers used it for it's garbage collection for a server program that ran continously, to avoid issues with constantly allocating and releasing memory. I don't know what other features it offers. Do a web search for "msdn .net", "msdn asp.net", "msdn .net garbage collection", and you should find some articles.

 

[Borek]

Visual Studio is the Microsoft IDE (integrated development environment).

 

[Avichal]

What is .NET specifically? How does it support so many languages? Am I right to compare it with web2py? (I want to compare it with web2py because that's the only framework I have worked with yet)

 

[phinds]

What is .NET specifically? How does it support so many languages? Am I right to compare it with web2py? (I want to compare it with web2py because that's the only framework I have worked with yet)

Which part of " Visual Studio is the Microsoft IDE (integrated development environment)" did you not understand? Do you know what a framework is? Why not just Google it and read about it?

 

[trollcast]

What is .NET specifically? How does it support so many languages? Am I right to compare it with web2py? (I want to compare it with web2py because that's the only framework I have worked with yet)

http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/3992/What-is-NET

Second link on google for "What is .net", gives a fairly good overview.

 

[Avichal]

http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/3992/What-is-NET

Second link on google for "What is .net", gives a fairly good overview.

Oh, the common language run-time answers quite a bit. Thanks for the link.
I suppose I will just play with it to understand it more. It's the layers of abstraction of the software which is confusing me.