The language-neutrality of the .NET platform results in several benefits to developers:

• Code Reusability and Sharing

In the past, developers often had problems sharing code, because some developers on a team would work in C++ and some would work in other languages, such as Visual Basic. Depending upon how the C++ code was written, it may or may not have been accessible by Visual Basic developers. .NET does away with this problem, because now any .NET-compatible language can call any .NET class, and it can even extend that class for its own purposes. Reusing code now becomes automatic.

• Same API Access for all Languages

The same set of base classes is available for programmers, irrespective of the coding language they use.

• Implementation Inheritance

A class or component written in one language can be extended in another language.

• Exception handling Across Languages

Traditionally, a language's error-handling model relied on either the language's unique way of detecting errors and locating handlers for them, or on the error-handling mechanism provided by the operating system. In the .NET platform, the Common Language Runtime (CLR) greatly assists the design of error-tolerant software by providing a platform for uniform error handling. CLR handles exceptions for all .NET-compatible languages. It doesn't matter which language was used to generate the exception or which language will be called upon to handle the exception.

Supported Languages