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

Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

 technologies that enable the Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

 platform and the Internet

Internet

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

 to work together. Some of the principal technologies comprising DNA include ActiveX

ActiveX

ActiveX is a framework for defining reusable software components in a programming language-independent way. Software applications can then be composed from one or more of these components in order to provide their functionality....

, Dynamic HTML

Dynamic HTML

Dynamic HTML, or DHTML, is an umbrella term for a collection of technologies used together to create interactive and animated web sites by using a combination of a static markup language , a client-side scripting language , a presentation definition language , and the Document Object Model.DHTML...

 (DHTML) and COM

Component Object Model

Component Object Model is a binary-interface standard for software componentry introduced by Microsoft in 1993. It is used to enable interprocess communication and dynamic object creation in a large range of programming languages...

. Windows DNA has been largely superseded by the Microsoft .NET Framework

.NET Framework

The .NET Framework is a software framework that runs primarily on Microsoft Windows. It includes a large library and supports several programming languages which allows language interoperability...

, and Microsoft no longer uses the term. To support web based application Microsoft has tried to add internet

Internet

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

features into the OS using COM. But developing a web based application
using COM based Windows DNA is quite complex. The complexity is due to the simple fact that Windows DNA requires the use of numerous technologies and languages.
These technologies are completely unrelated from a syntatic point of view.

External links

• Windows DNA at Smart Computing Encyclopedia