I have, I guess, only a vague understanding of what truly makes something ".NET" or not. I would love if someone would give me an hypothetical explanation of what a ".NET" version of perl code would entail.

I've been under the impression that a big part of .NET's essence is the concept of writing functions as Web Services. Such as, exposing the functionality of your program through a Soap API so any remote platform in any language can send a data object represented as XML and get back the results also as XML. If you haven't checked out Perl's SOAP modules, it sounds like they might interest you, by the way.

But how far away is using a SOAP architecture in web-based perl software to expose its API from it being ".NET". It's definetely becoming a buzzword, and seemingly very cool for something to be ".NET" compliant. But what does it mean? I would love a good explanation to this in regards to perl programming...