Microsoft .net And The Strong Windows Ties Microsofts .NET is the best platform when targeting Windows

[k_nitin_r 8]

Microsoft's .NET platform may not be the best when it comes to building web applications, but the ability to create background Windows services (the equivalent of Linux daemons) is definitely top-notch. The API provided by Microsoft could use a lot of improvement to simplify the process of creating a web service, but it is currently the simplest that web service development ever has been.The Microsoft .NET platform is able to provide the best environment for Windows services because it exclusively targets the Microsoft Windows environment. I know a lot of other programmers would differ from this remark claiming that the Microsoft Intermediate Language (MSIL) does for .NET what the Java byte code does for Java, and that it can be run across multiple platforms, including the Mono framework developed by Novell, but is that truly multi-platform? The Microsoft Intermediate Language achieves the ability to run .NET programs on both 32-bit and 64-bit execution environments as long as they do not have any references to dynamic link libraries (DLLs) that specifically target these environments. You cannot expect every .NET program to run on Linux over the Mono framework simply because they differ in the functionality that they provide, although they do have a lot in common. Windows Forms applications and Windows Services are Windows-specific and cannot run on Mono for Linux.Take the Java platform and the Java programming language with the set of frameworks and libraries that it provides. Java offers a true write-once run-anywhere functionality whereby you can create an application that uses the Swing or the AWT framework and you can expect it to function exactly the same on another platform. Whatever is platform-specific is not a part of the Java framework but is available as an add-on library. The requirement of the add-on library discourages software developers from wanting to use a particular feature though the platform does not strictly forbid it. As is the case with Microsoft .NET based applications, Java applications that make specific calls to dynamic link libraries would not be portable across operating systems or hardware platforms due to the presence of native or machine-specific code. However, as long as you have a virtual machine available for a particular environment, which is the case with pretty much every major operating system or hardware platform, you can write and run Java code on that platform.