MS.NET VERSIONS

MS.NET VERSIONS

With the recent release of.NET 4.0 a lot of confusion has crept into .NET versions. Right from the beginning .NET versions numbers are in sync with C# and ASP.NET. However, with .NET 3.0 and .NET 3.5 things have changed.

In this article, I attempt to clear of some of your doubts regarding versions in .NET.

First C# and Visual Basic.NET are the two main languages that are used to develop application on .NET. The choice between C# and VB.NET is mainly a personal choice. C# is also called as Visual C# and C#.NET. They all mean the same C#.

.NET 1.0

First versions of .NET was .NET 1.0, which was released in February 2002.  The other versions were ASP.NET 1.0,  C# 1.0  and Visual Basic.NET 2002. It is common to find people refer to .NET 1.0  as .NET 2002 and C# 1.0 as C# 2002 etc. Though not strictly right, it is accepted.

.NET 1.1

Next version called .NET 1.1,  was released in 2003. C# 1.1, Visual Basic.NET 2003, ASP.NET 1.1 and Visual Studio.NET 2003 were the versions.
It was not a major release, a few changes were made here and there.

.NET 2.0

The next versions was released in 2005. It was a major release and added a lot of features especially to ASP.NET. It added concepts like partial classes, generics, iterators, anonymous methods, nullable types and static classes to C# and VB.NET.
A change in majorversion number is quite justified.

ASP.NET 1.1 became ASP.NET 2.0, C# 1.1 became C#2.0, 2003 became 2005 in Visual Basic.NET 2005 and Visual Studio.NET 2005.

.NET 3.0

This was a silent release. Not many people know that there was .NET 3.0. It was mainly released along with Windows Vista and it added WCF (Window Communication Foundation), WPF (Windows PresentationFoundation) and WF (Windows Workflow Foundation) to the .NET platform.

However it did not change ASP.NET or C# or VB.NET. Visual Studio.NET also remained the same. 

This is where the version number of ASP.NET and .NET differed. Only .NET has become 3.0, leaving the rest at 2.0. 

.NET 3.5

It has brought a change in all. Now versions numbers for C# remained 3.0 but ASP.NET changed to 3.5 causing all kinds of confusion.

Visual Basic.NET 2008 is the new version of visual basic and Visual Studio.NET 2008 was released.

LINQ was one of the major additions.

C# and VB.NET have been enhanced with very interesting features (like anonymous data types , the var-key word and extensions methods), which aremainly used in the context of LINQ.

.NET 4.0

The .NET 4.0 was in 2010. The new version number for C# and ASP.NET was 4.0.
C# gets dynamic types, optional and named method parameters, covariance and contravariance as new features.

Visual Basic .NET 2010 is the new version of Visual Basic and Visual Studio.NET 2010 was released.

.NET 4.5

The latest release in .NET was 4.5 in 2012. It has many new features and improvements.

See more

Summary of versions

The following table summarizes the versions of .NET  and its related technologies as far.