Enduring Advantages of the .NET Framework NET 3.5 has passed the six-month mark since being officially released so this seems a good time to strip the hype away and focus on just why the Microsoft offering of Web-ready building-block applications is here to stay. Herewith a mere handful of the strategic advantages afforded by the ever-expanding NET framework set of technologies: 1. Dramatic boosts in performance with pages enabled for output caching. After executing a page and sending it to the requesting user, NET framework components leave the result in memory and serve the cached version when another user requests the same page (or part of it). This reduces the communication load with the back-end database, too. 2. Leveraging a broader set of stock knowledge in programming languages. On top of VBScript and Jscript, teams of NET framework architects like those at well-regarded HyTech Professionals (www.hytechpro.com) in Nashua (NH) code in no less than 25 languages like C#, VB.NET, JScript.NET, and Visual Studio 2008. This is pretty much what you’d expect for a Microsoft Certified Gold Partner that delivers over 100 applications every year on the NET framework. 3. Great administrative and project management tools over the development life cycle. VS.NET enterprise edition helps with planning, analysis, four modeling options, three test tool classes, and productivity owing to a slew of templates. 4. Under Reporting Services 2005, default access security relies on the organization hewing to Windows Authentication mode. For Web-facing applications and to provide reports through the company firewall, happily, one can a write a bit of .NET code under the NET framework IAuthenticationExtension security extension interface so as to override the default and deploy a third-party security manager