Good write up that wonderfully encapsulates how stupid Microsoft’s naming is - you didn’t even mention .NET standard.
I love .NET. It’s a great stack, especially for backend web apps. Blazor is a great SPA framework too. But I loathe how Microsoft continue to handle just about everything that isn’t the framework and C# / F#. It’s laughable.
Oh don’t get me wrong - I wasn’t criticising your write up. It was concise and still relevant.
It’s just funny for newcomers to peel back the onion more. Writing a source generator? Target .NET standard 2.0 (not even 2.1) for a whole host of reasons.
The ".NET" label was applied to a bunch of things at Microsoft.
It was also an early name given to their social networking / IM things.
But for the last 20-ish years it's really only been applied to things related to the .NET Framework.
So, yes - Visual Basic.NET is a language - it's the language that replaced Visual Basic 6. It compiles to the Intermediate Language (IL) that the Common Language Runtime (CLR) executes. There are other languages that compile to IL, too like C#, F#.
The .NET Framework is really a bunch of libraries and tools that are packaged together.
The .NET Standard is a standard that allows you to build a library to a known set of supported libraries and IL / CLR features.
So, yes, depending on which specific part you're referring to - it's all of those.
The "Xbox Series X" is such a nonsensical name that only a marketing department could come with it. And this entire line of names exists solely because someone thought that nobody would buy a "Xbox 2" instead of a "PlayStation 3".
Because X's mean moar marketing power... Like the Extreme X870E X motherboard... There's multiple X's and Extremes and the X's mean extreme... so it's moar extreme!!!
I love .NET. It’s a great stack, especially for backend web apps. Blazor is a great SPA framework too. But I loathe how Microsoft continue to handle just about everything that isn’t the framework and C# / F#. It’s laughable.