The .NET family of frameworks
.NET is a general-purpose development platform developed by Microsoft for writing a variety of types of applications for desktop, cloud, and mobile. .NET Framework was the first implementation of the CLI but, over time, a series of other frameworks have been created, such as .NET Micro Framework, .NET Native, and Silverlight. While .NET Framework works on Windows, other current implementations, such as .NET Core and Mono/Xamarin, are cross-platform and run on other operating systems, such as Linux, macOS, iOS, or Android.
The following screenshot shows the main characteristics of the current top .NET frameworks. .NET Framework is intended for developing .NET applications for Windows and is distributed with the operating system. .NET Core, which is cross-platform and open source, is optimized for modern application requirements and developer workflows and is distributed with the application. Xamarin, which uses a Mono-based runtime, is also cross-platform...