''Windows DNA'', short for ''Windows Distributed interNet Applications Architecture'', is a marketing name for a collection of

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...

technologies that enable the

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

platform and the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...

to work together. Some of the principal technologies that DNA comprises are ActiveX, Dynamic HTML (DHTML) and

COM Com or COM may refer to: Computing * COM (hardware interface), a serial port interface on IBM PC-compatible computers * COM file, or .com file, short for "command", a file extension for an executable file in MS-DOS * .com, an Internet top-level d ...

. Windows DNA has been largely superseded by the Microsoft

.NET Framework The .NET Framework (pronounced as "''dot net"'') 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 bein ...

, and Microsoft no longer uses the term. To support web-based applications, Microsoft has tried to add Internet features into the operating system using COM. However, developing a web-based application using COM-based Windows DNA is quite complex, because Windows DNA requires the use of numerous technologies and languages. These technologies are completely unrelated from a syntactic point of view.

External links

Unraveling Windows DNA at MSDN

Windows DNA
at Smart Computing Encyclopedia
Microsoft's DNA Web page in 1999
{{microsoft-stub Windows communication and services