Programming Windows: Why .NET? (Premium)

When Microsoft chairman Bill Gates belatedly revealed .NET in June 2000, he offered a vague and confusing look at the future. But things got much more specific about a month later, when the software giant hosted its Professional Developers Conference (PDC) 2000 in Orlando, Florida. There, for the first time, developers learned about the various technologies that would make up .NET, a new programming language called C#, and a new version of the Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE). They also heard the first official word on the next two versions of Windows, codenamed Whistler and Blackcomb, the former of which I had first leaked to the world.

I’ll have more to say about all that soon. For now, let’s focus on the reality of .NET as opposed to the marketing smokescreen that Microsoft had presented one month before PDC 2000. Starting with why .NET even exists. What problems did it hope to solve?

As Richard Campbell explains in his excellent History of .NET talks, .NET wasn’t the result of a years-long strategy or some single visionary leader. Instead, it was the culmination of three separate but related efforts to advance various aspects of Microsoft’s software development stack.

The first involves runtimes, the environments in which software code runs. In the Microsoft world, there were several different runtimes by the beginning of the 21st century, each with several different versions. The most obvious examples are Visual Basic---where the file VBRUN300.DLL represents the popular Visual Basic 3.0 runtime---and Visual C++, which supported multiple runtimes.

Before Visual Studio arrived in 1997, each of Microsoft’s programming languages and environments wastc developed and sold separately. And in addition to having different runtimes, each had different IDEs, different ways of interacting with the system, different extensibility models, and other differences. Visual Basic had a graphical forms designer that made creating Windows user interfaces easy enough for beginners. But Visual C++, despite its name, did not. (Well, for the most part. Over time, Microsoft did add limited graphical UI capabilities to that product.)

The goal with Visual Studio was to make Microsoft’s developer solutions more consistent and integrated with each other. But that would have to happen over time. The initial release of the product, Visual Studio 97, was simply an Office-style bundle of several previously separate environments, including Visual Basic 5.0, Visual C++ 5.0, Visual J++ 1.0 (for Java), Visual InterDev 1.0 (for Active Server Pages (ASP)-based web development), Visual FoxPro 5.0, and the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) documentation for each. Each had its own user interface and capabilities.

Its successor, Visual Studio 6.0, arrived in late 1998 and provided an integrated IDE for both Visual InterDev 6.0 and Visual J++ 6.0---both saw their version numbers incremented to match both Visual Studio and the c...