What is .NET?
.NET is a free and open-source application platform supported by Microsoft.
.NET
.NET is a secure, reliable, and high-performance application platform.
C# is the programming language for .NET. It's strongly-typed and type-safe and has integrated concurrency and automatic memory management.
C#
C# is a modern, safe, and object-oriented, programming language that spans from high-level features such as data-oriented records to low-level features such as function pointers.
Cross Platform
.NET is supported on Android, Apple, Linux, and Windows operating systems. It's available in several Linux distributions, like Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Ubuntu.
Libraries
.NET includes a standard set of libraries and APIs, ranging from collections, to networking, to machine learning.
NuGet is the package manager for .NET and contains over 300,000 packages.
Application models
You can build many types of apps with .NET. To help you build apps faster, app models are built on top of the base libraries.
Active community and open-source
.NET is open source and under the .NET Foundation. The .NET Foundation is an independent organization to foster open development and collaboration around the .NET ecosystem.
.NET is open source. You can join the thousands of developers and companies already contributing to the .NET platform.
Get quick answers to questions with an active community of developers on Stack Overflow.
Tools
You can build apps with the .NET CLI, Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, and other tools on any operating system. It's straightforward to configure continuous integration with services like GitHub Actions and push deployments to the cloud.
Why choose .NET?
Find out why customers all over the world, in many different industries, rely on .NET.
Ready to get started?
Learn .NET easily with our step-by-step tutorials.