Monday, March 21, 2005

The current state of .NET

Richard Grimes on .NET

It is now almost three years since I started writing this newsletter and now I've decided to finish. I thought I would provide a concluding article to give my view on the current state of .NET.

I started using .NET when it was in technical preview at the beginning of 2000; at that time it was called COM+2 and the main language was something called Cool. The framework briefly became Next Generation Windows Services (NGWS) before some marketing wonk came up with a term that really would confuse Internet search engines: .NET. How many times have you been asked what .NET means and what relationship it has to .COM and .ORG? Of course, Cool faired no better. Some bright spark decided to call it C#, which initially confused search engines and users alike. The search engines did not like the # character and the users did not know how to pronounce it (C-pound? Or for those of us on the eastern side of the Atlantic, C-hash?).


I had always assumed that it was referred to as C-sharp. Apparently there are no musicians in Mircrosoft’s marketing department.

More seriously this is a good overview of .NET for those of us who are only vaguely familiar with the technical issues of programming languages.

Edit-
Some different perspectives-
Robert McLaws: FunWithCoding.NET

Rebuttal to Dr Richard Grimes article on .Net

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