ASP.NET is an open-source, server-side web-application framework designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. It was developed by Microsoft to allow programmers to build dynamic web sites, applications and services. The name stands for Active Server Pages Network Enabled Technologies.
The .NET Framework is a proprietary software framework developed by Microsoft that runs primarily on Microsoft Windows. It was the predominant implementation of the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) until being superseded by the cross-platform .NET project. It includes a large class library called Framework Class Library (FCL) and provides language interoperability across several programming languages. Programs written for .NET Framework execute in a software environment named the Common Language Runtime (CLR). The CLR is an application virtual machine that provides services such as security, memory management, and exception handling. As such, computer code written using .NET Framework is called "managed code". FCL and CLR together constitute the .NET Framework.
NuGet is a package manager, primarily used for packaging and distributing software written using the .NET framework. The Outercurve Foundation initially created it under the name NuPack. Since its introduction in 2010, NuGet has evolved into a larger ecosystem of tools and services, including a free and open-source client application, hosted package servers, and software deployment tools.
Probabilistic programming (PP) is a programming paradigm in which probabilistic models are specified and inference for these models is performed automatically. It represents an attempt to unify probabilistic modeling and traditional general purpose programming in order to make the former easier and more widely applicable. It can be used to create systems that help make decisions in the face of uncertainty.
ASP.NET Core was a brand briefly used by Microsoft for the rewrite of ASP.NET. It was initially a modular framework that runs on both the full .NET Framework, on Windows, and the cross-platform .NET. However, ASP.NET Core version 3 only worked on .NET Core, dropping support of the .NET Framework.
.NET is a free and open-source, managed computer software framework for Windows, Linux, and macOS operating systems. It is a cross-platform successor to .NET Framework. The project is mainly developed by Microsoft employees by way of the .NET Foundation, and released under an MIT License.
TensorFlow is a free and open-source software library for machine learning and artificial intelligence. It can be used across a range of tasks but has a particular focus on training and inference of deep neural networks.
The following table compares notable software frameworks, libraries and computer programs for deep learning.
PyTorch is a machine learning framework based on the Torch library, used for applications such as computer vision and natural language processing, originally developed by Meta AI and now part of the Linux Foundation umbrella. It is free and open-source software released under the modified BSD license. Although the Python interface is more polished and the primary focus of development, PyTorch also has a C++ interface.
The Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX) [] is an open-source artificial intelligence ecosystem of technology companies and research organizations that establish open standards for representing machine learning algorithms and software tools to promote innovation and collaboration in the AI sector. ONNX is available on GitHub.
ML.NET is a free software machine learning library for the C# and F# programming languages. It also supports Python models when used together with NimbusML. The preview release of ML.NET included transforms for feature engineering like n-gram creation, and learners to handle binary classification, multi-class classification, and regression tasks. Additional ML tasks like anomaly detection and recommendation systems have since been added, and other approaches like deep learning will be included in future versions.
Microsoft, a technology company historically known for its opposition to the open source software paradigm, turned to embrace the approach in the 2010s. From the 1970s through 2000s under CEOs Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, Microsoft viewed the community creation and sharing of communal code, later to be known as free and open source software, as a threat to its business, and both executives spoke negatively against it. In the 2010s, as the industry turned towards cloud, embedded, and mobile computing—technologies powered by open source advances—CEO Satya Nadella led Microsoft towards open source adoption although Microsoft's traditional Windows business continued to grow throughout this period generating revenues of 26.8 billion in the third quarter of 2018, while Microsoft's Azure cloud revenues nearly doubled.
Orleans is a cross-platform software framework for building scalable and robust distributed interactive applications based on the .NET Framework or on the more recent .NET.
DeepSpeed is an open source deep learning optimization library for PyTorch. The library is designed to reduce computing power and memory use and to train large distributed models with better parallelism on existing computer hardware. DeepSpeed is optimized for low latency, high throughput training. It includes the Zero Redundancy Optimizer (ZeRO) for training models with 1 trillion or more parameters. Features include mixed precision training, single-GPU, multi-GPU, and multi-node training as well as custom model parallelism. The DeepSpeed source code is licensed under MIT License and available on GitHub.
NNI is a free and open-source AutoML toolkit developed by Microsoft. It is used to automate feature engineering, model compression, neural architecture search, and hyper-parameter tuning.
LightGBM, short for light gradient-boosting machine, is a free and open-source distributed gradient-boosting framework for machine learning, originally developed by Microsoft. It is based on decision tree algorithms and used for ranking, classification and other machine learning tasks. The development focus is on performance and scalability.
CatBoost is an open-source software library developed by Yandex. It provides a gradient boosting framework which among other features attempts to solve for Categorical features using a permutation driven alternative compared to the classical algorithm. It works on Linux, Windows, macOS, and is available in Python, R, and models built using catboost can be used for predictions in C++, Java, C#, Rust, Core ML, ONNX, and PMML. The source code is licensed under Apache License and available on GitHub.
GitHub Copilot is a cloud-based artificial intelligence tool developed by GitHub and OpenAI to assist users of Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, Neovim, and JetBrains integrated development environments (IDEs) by autocompleting code. Currently available by subscription to individual developers and to businesses, the tool was first announced by GitHub on 29 June 2021, and works best for users coding in Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Ruby, and Go.
