What is .NET Framework
Microsoft’s .NET platform is more than just a development environment or an addition of some new innovative servers. Microsoft’s vision is that .NET will shift the Internet’s focus from individual sites or devices to constellations of computers, devices, and services that work together to deliver broader, richer solutions, allowing people to have control over how, when, and what information is delivered to them.

Microsoft .NET framework has been designed with a goal of accomplishing many tasks in a simple, fast and efficient manner. There are quite a number of purpose-specific tools attached with this revolutionary framework. Also it can do things such as data access, windowing, connecting to the Internet, and much of the functionality of the Win32 API is now accessible through a very simple object model.

Benefits of .NET Framework
Microsoft .NET Framework technology represents a very significant shift in technology paradigms, allowing developers to build componentized, reusable and highly scalable functionality that is available across a network or the Internet regardless of platform. If suppose every .NET solution becoming a set of building blocks, then software developers can easily reuse, rearrange, and integrate these blocks in a quick manner with each successive solution thereby reducing the time to take them to market or clients drastically.

If we take .NET to the next level, it becomes even easier to develop integrated solutions with partners, customers, users and suppliers outside our enterprise. The very nature of the code and platform make it simpler and less costly.

Most new technologies go through an adoption curve that gives the opportunity to prepare slowly for their implementation. Microsoft .NET offers a complete, well-thought-out, stable, and robust platform that's ready for prime time. It shortens the development time, enables us to have bug-free, flexible and elegant software solutions

The changes .NET brings for developers are quite dramatic, and so is the learning curve for those developers who typically use Visual Basic COM applications. .NET languages such as C# and VisualBasic.NET will give the software developers enough opportunity to take forward their ambitions.

We spend very less design, development, deployment time for .NET projects. This is because .NET includes a vast class of libraries and an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that allows developers to build business logic and Web-based user interfaces significantly faster than ever before.

The real value of the .NET platform lies not in delivering pigeonholed projects better, faster, and cheaper (although it can do that quite well) but in building solutions that can be easily leveraged throughout the enterprise and beyond.

Features of .NET Framework
The VB language has been hugely upgraded, so it now includes classes and most of the features previously accessible in C++.
A new language, C#, has been introduced, which combines the efficiency of C++ with some of the ease of development of VB.
Memory management for .NET applications is much more sophisticated, meaning that a badly behaved .NET component is extremely unlikely to crash other components running in the same process.
ASP.NET, the replacement for ASP, offers compiled web pages (making processing of web requests much more efficient) and includes a large number of pre-written components that can generate commonly used HTML form and user-interface items
The main programming languages have been moved far closer together, so code written in VB, C++ and C# can be intermixed
Components are wrapped up in a new unit called an assembly, which is highly self-describing, making installation and use of components very easy.