hi everyone and welcome to the net beginner series my name is cloudo and I'll be taking you through it so let's go ahead and get started with what is net net is a free open-source crossplatform development platform I know that's a lot of words so we can take them one by one so first of all free is free we do not charge anything to be able to use net open source means that we develop in the open it means you can see the code that our team is writing to develop net and we actively encourage the external to community to submit PRS to our repositories to help change the direction of net crossplatform means that it works and runs on Linux Mac OS and windows and a development platform just means it has programming languages and libraries so when you put this all together it's a a free development environment where developers can build applications for their customers what languages and what tools can you kind of use here so net supports c f and more as far as tools go you can use your favorite integrated development environment such as Visual Studio or Visual Studio code now you're a beginner and you may be asking yourself there's a couple options here which one do you really recommend so since f is the functional programming language and C is the object-oriented programming language we recommend you start off with c and visual studio code if you keep watching I'll actually be showing you how to get started with both of those two so what can you build withn net almost anything you can build web apps and services mobile and desktop applications with one single codebase Cloud native applications iot apis you can build almost anything so whether you're a new developer who's just getting started on your journey or you have experience and you're interested in net we very likely have a home for you here and you can build what you want for your customers then you might have heard of net and Net Framework and aren't these two things the same how are they different so let's go ahead and take a look at a side by side that'll clear things up for us so on the right side we have NET Framework which is the first rendition of our product that only ran on Windows net is the modernized version which runs on Linux Mac OS and windows it's also open source and like I mentioned it accepts contributions from the community donet framework on the other hand the source code is available but it does not accept contributions and then modern. net is where all the Innovation actually happens and we support more application typeset framework has security and reliability bugs on a monthly basis modern doet is also not shipped with any particular operating system whereas NET Framework does come out of the box with Windows and is updated by windows but the biggest difference I actually want to call out here is that modern. net is recommended for all new development so when you're a new person taking on a new project we highly recommend you go with modern. net now it can be a little tricky sometimes to understand which one you're downloading so let me go ahead and give you a little cheat sheet here so when you see version 4.8.1 or lower that is NET Framework that should really only exclusively be downloaded if the project that you're working on exclusively calls for it if you want to use modern. net you're looking for any version five and above obviously we just had our net 8 released so we highly recommend that you install and work with net 8 so now that I've kind of given you the lay of the land of what is net here are a few more resources you can take a look at we have the net website our documentation where you can actually download and a Hello World tutorial now if you stay for the next video I'm going to show you how to install net and how you can get started with vs code in C see you in the next one