Get an overview aout version history of .NET Framework

·   .NET Framework 1.0: In July 2000, the .NET Framework was first announced publicly at Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Orlando, Florida. At PDC, Microsoft also demonstrated C#, and announced ASP+ (which was later renamed to ASP.NET) and Visual Studio.NET. It took more than a year and a half, but, in February 2002, .NET Framework 1.0 was released as part of a pair with Visual Studio.NET (the latter of which is often referred as Visual Studio .NET 2002).

·   .NET Framework 1.1: A bit more than a year after Visual Studio.NET was released, a new version, Visual Studio .NET 2003, was shipped together with .NET Framework 1.1. Microsoft had a lot of work to do to stabilize the framework, and, of course, dozens of critical bugs were fixed. A few things (such as the security model) were also changed, and new features were added to the framework (such as built-in support for building mobile applications, IPv6 support, and built-in data access for ODBC and Oracle databases). Also, the CLR became more stable from version 1.0 to 1.1.

·   .NET Framework 2.0: The next major version, .NET Framework 2.0, was released in the middle of February 2006 with Visual Studio 2005, Microsoft SQL Server 2005, and BizTalk 2006.

·  .NET Framework 3.0: This major .NET version kept the CLR untouched and added infrastructure components to the framework - Windows Workflow Foundations (WF), Windows Communication Foundations (WCF), Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), and CardSpace. Developers could download Visual Studio extensions to use these new .NET 3.0 technologies.

·   .NET Framework 3.5: Version 3.5 of the .NET Framework was released on November 19, 2007. As with .NET Framework 3.0, version 3.5 uses the Common Language Run-time (CLR) version 2.0. In addition, it installs .NET Framework 2.0 SP1 (which installs .NET Framework 2.0 SP2 with 3.5 SP1) and .NET Framework 3.0 SP1 (which installs .NET Framework 3.0 SP2 with 3.5 SP1). These changes do not affect applications written for version 2.0, however.

·    .NET Framework 4.0: Microsoft announced .NET Framework 4.0 on September 29, 2008. The Public Beta was released on May 20, 2009 and final version released on March 22, 2010.

·   .NET Framework 4.5: .NET Framework 4.5 is currently the latest version and was released Aug 2012 with features and improvements were added to the common language runtime.