.NET is essentially a framework for software development.It is similar in nature to any other software development framework (J2EE etc) in that it provides a set of runtime
containers/capabilities, and a rich set of prebuilt functionality in the form of class libraries and APIs.

The .NET Framework is an environment for building, deploying, and running Web Services and other applications. It consists of three main parts: the Common Language Runtime,the Framework classes, and ASP.NET.