A more thorough definition of .NET would be that it is a top level domain, initially designed to be used by Internet Service Providers, but now it has expanded and everyone can make use of a .net domain. It uses the Internet DNS (domain Naming System) and it is an abbreviation of the word 'network'.

.NET can hold servers that provide web services or the tools needed to create these services.

What are Web Services and their benefits? Well they can be called enhancements that help businesses expand and connect with their customers and partners. Their benefits are that they make the communication between business partners much easier and even increase the profits by making a business known and available to much more people through the help of the Internet.

An Important part of the .Net technology and framework is the ASP.net set of technologies. These web development technologies are used in the creation of Websites and Web services usable on the .NET infrastructure.

ASP.NET was built by Microsoft from one of their older technologies and web programmers can use any programming language they want to write ASP.NET, from Perl to C# and of course Visual Basic.NET and any other language understood by the .NET technology.

The advantages of the ASP.NET technology are that it makes building Websites, Web applications and Web services very easy and with less code that older languages. Also, the applications compiled in ASP.NET run faster and with less errors

You can find many free tutorials and documentation about how to use the .NET framework and about the ASP.Net platform so getting started in this domain can be pretty easy. You can also find many examples amd articles about things that are easy to make and that you can study and use for learning and understanding. After learning a little you will be able to create easy-to-build applications that allow users to organize their own page's appearance.

Also, if you're going to use ASP.NET applications you should get one of the specially designed software packages for ASP , like Visual Studio.NET or the ASP.NET Web Matrix.

So the .NET and ASP.NET technologies are very popular and have an extremely large number of business-enhancing uses and applications.

A good place to start learning more about how people-ready applications and systems can be built using the .NET 2.0 framework is the Microsoft Practice section of www.unitekconsulting.com.