Question

May I know what is the difference between C# and .NET? When I think of C#, right away I would say it is a .NET language, but when I search for job posts, they require candidates to have C# and .NET experience. Can someone give me an explanation?

Answer 1

In addition to Andrew’s answer, it is worth noting that:

• .NET isn’t just a library, but also a runtime for executing applications.
• The knowledge of C# implies some knowledge of .NET (because the C# object model corresponds to the .NET object model and you can do something interesting in C# just by using .NET libraries). The opposite isn’t necessarily true as you can use other languages to write .NET applications.

The distinction between a language, a runtime, and a library is more strict in .NET/C# than for example in C++, where the language specification also includes some basic library functions. The C# specification says only a very little about the environment (basically, that it should contain some types such as int, but that’s more or less all).