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Microsoft should have ended the year 2000 on a triumphant note, but an economic downturn and internal worries about .NET made for a dour holiday.

Microsoft had to deliver on its sweeping promises for .NET and a new generation of Windows. It would fail on both counts.

While most of Microsoft’s public .NET pronouncements involved web services, .NET also brought a major upgrade to Windows app development.

In 2000, Microsoft was working to modernize Visual Basic for the .NET era and make its capabilities available to C# as well.

Microsoft planned to release Whistler and Blackcomb back-to-back to usher in the .NET era and rebrand Windows to Windows.NET.

Developers curious about the future of the Microsoft developer stack filed into PDC 2000 in Orlando to learn more about .NET in July 2000.

.NET wasn’t the result of a years-long strategy. Instead, it was the culmination of three separate internal initiatives to improve the developer stack.

After a two-year wait, I’m happy to announce that I’m returning to my Programming Windows series and will pick up where I left off.

While the rest of Microsoft embraces open source and open standards, Windows app development remains stuck in the proprietary past.

The Universal Windows Platform (UWP) isn’t particularly well-suited to traditional productivity applications.

I decided to port .NETpad from Visual Basic to C# in order to get up to speed on the latter language as quickly as possible.

For much of the past year, I’ve been researching and working with Microsoft’s previous-generation developer technologies.

Originally called COOL, for C++ Object-Oriented Language, this new language would very closely resemble Java.

Anders Hejlsberg has been doing the impossible since his first foray into programming language and compiler design in 1980.

On June 22, 2000, Microsoft co-founder and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates announced the .NET (“dot NET”) platform.

With Sun suing to block Microsoft’s extensions to Java, the software giant decided to create a new programming language of its own.

With Microsoft's legal losses mounting in its U.S. antitrust case, the software giant suffered from an exodus of key executives.

Sun was the more powerful adversary, but Microsoft’s strategy against it was consistent with what it did to Netscape and the web.

During a month’s long mediation process in U.S. v. Microsoft, developer documentation became a key requirement for a settlement.

Heading into the late 1990s, Microsoft sought to consolidate its developer languages and tools into a single, cohesive environment.

Microsoft first came to the attention to regulators a decade before its celebrated and vilified U.S. antitrust trial.

We’re now three months and over 50 articles into the Programming Windows series. Here’s another quick progress report.

When Microsoft announced that the oft-delayed Windows NT 5.0 would be renamed to Windows 2000, it marked the end of an era.

It’s not exactly a road not taken, as each of its constituent parts did come to fruition. But Windows DNA was short-lived as a brand.

With Windows NT 5.0 delayed again and again, Microsoft didn’t notice yet another competitor nipping at its heels.

Two years into its incredible embrace of the Internet, Bill Gates became convinced that the strategy was now threatening Windows from within.

VBScript was best used with the IIS web server and Active Server Pages (ASP) to “activate the Internet” with databases and ActiveX components.