Technologies

Language In Use is a quite complex project. I wanted to use it as my personal experiment to learn new technologies and to improve my skills. As a long-time developer, I have seen many technologies come and go. I have seen many frameworks and libraries that promised to be the best and the most used. I have seen many developers giving up wiht them. So, my decision was to use the most stable and reliable technologies that I know: those technologies are coming from Microsoft and the framework is called NET.

What is .NET?

The Microsoft .NET Framework is a software development framework for building and running applications on Windows. It is part of the .NET platform, which is a collection of technologies for building apps for Linux, macOS, Windows, iOS, Android, and more.

The .NET Framework is the original implementation of .NET and supports running websites, services, desktop apps, and more on Windows. The two major components of .NET Framework are the Common Language Runtime and the .NET Framework Class Library.

The Common Language Runtime (CLR) is the execution engine that handles running applications. It provides services like thread management, garbage collection, type-safety, exception handling, and more.

The Class Library provides a set of APIs and types for common functionality. It provides types for strings, dates, numbers, etc. The Class Library includes APIs for reading and writing files, connecting to databases, drawing, and more.

The most common languages for writing .NET Framework apps are C# and Visual Basic (it is becoming quite rare).

Latest version

The latest version of .NET is .NET 8 released in November 2023. This is a software development platform that provides a collection of technologies for building apps for Linux, macOS, Windows, iOS, Android, and more. .NET 8 is the successor to .NET 7 and will be supported for three years as a long-term support (LTS) release. It includes many new features and improvements, such as performance boosts, ASP.NET Core enhancements, and .NET MAUI platform and stability improvements.

Language In Use website (LIU)

LIU is a web application that uses the latest version of .NET, .NET 8 and C#. It is a ASP.NET Core application that uses Blazor as a framework for the UI. The application is hosted on Microsoft Azure and uses Azure App Service as a service.

Language In Use backend

The backend is a ASP.NET Core application built with C# that uses Entity Framework Core as an ORM (Object Relational Mapper) to access the database. The database is a Microsoft SQL Server database.

Language In Use Desktop & Mobile application

The desktop and mobile application is a MAUI application built in C#. MAUI is great! With one single project, you can build applications for Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS, Android, and more.