Can anyone tell me whats the difference between visual studio and visual studio."NET" And what is .NET any way?
Visual Studio (The last version being 6) produced what we now call "native code." In other words it produced a list of instructions for a processor to execute. Visual Studio targeted the x86 machine language. Visual Studio .NET primarily targets a machine language that microsoft made up. This language was not natively supported by any processor (though in recent months http://dotnetcpu.com has produced a processor that understands some of the language). Since no processor natively understands the code produced by Visual Studio .NET there is an extra piece of software needed to interpret the code and translate it into the processors language. At first it may sound silly to do all of this instead of just producing code that the processor understands. But there is an advantage. In theory programs you write could be ported to other processors without you having to rewrite the code. Instead the computer with the other processor would only need to have the interpreter. For example, in playing one day I rewrote tetris for my Pocket PC (which has a .Net interpreter). The program that was produced also would run on my desktop computer. If I had wanted to run it on a Mac or Linux computer I would only need to download an interpreter from http://mono-project.com . There are lots of other differences...more than I could ever list. But I think the above is a foundational difference.