The .NET Framework is a development platform that provides a common language runtime and class libraries. It allows programming languages to interact seamlessly by defining a common type system and language specification. .NET languages compile to intermediate language code that gets compiled to machine code by the just-in-time compiler. The class libraries provide basic functionality for tasks like data access, XML, windows forms, web development and web services. Visual Studio .NET is an IDE that supports building applications on the .NET platform.