The .NET Framework is Microsoft's current development environment for the Windows platform. It allows for a wide variety of applications to be created. Support for web applications is through the ASP.NET technology, which is a replacement for the Active Server Pages (ASP) web scripting platform.
The .NET Framework itself is programming language independent. A number of programming languages exist that can generate .NET Framework applications - these include Visual Basic.NET, C#, Visual C++ and Visual J#.