4 ms·

Sigh (fond memories) - I had just signed a deal to make my 1-person consulting company a Sun Certified Partner, as Java was clearly the future. VB6/COM was an

Sigh (fond memories) - I had just signed a deal to make my 1-person consulting company a Sun Certified Partner, as Java was clearly the future. VB6/COM was an obvious dead-end, and my other preferred alternative - Borland Delphi - was just not being considered by my enterprise clients. A friend who had recently been hired into Microsoft got me into the alpha pre-release program for .NET. And boom - I never touched Java again, except to port code to C# (or tell IBM sub-contractors how to integerate with .NET/Windows authentication ecosystems). Weirdly enough - as a programmer who got my start with VB1, I ended-up immediately preferring C# over VB.NET - mostly because my first paying .NET client was facing a complete dead-end with FoxPro - so, as we were performing architectural and technical evaluations of .NET, it was exciting to see that C# was submitted very early-on for ECMA (and eventually ISO) certification. Myself - I see the release of .NET as the point where Microsoft started to become more open, more platform-agnostic and more developer-friendly than it had ever been before.

roblabla 5y ago
> Myself - I see the release of .NET as the point where Microsoft started to become more open, more platform-agnostic and more developer-friendly than it had ever been before. .NET certainly was more developer friendly, and I guess more open in a way by engaging with standardizing bodies. But more platform-agnostic? The original .NET (anything before dotnet) was very windows-centric. You couldn't take your .NET code and run it anywhere else. The C# language was ISO-certified, sure, but not the APIs. And C# without the APIs is quite uninteresting. MS only started being interested in platform agnosticism again in the last 3-4 years, because they aren't the dominant platform anymore in a few important verticals (servers and mobile). But for most of the previous decade, they have not cared at all about it.
- jjkaczor 5y ago
  Agree - the platform agnostic thing is only a recent reality - but, the "possibility" was there at the begining, and at the time the future seemed very bright. (The fact that they did not sue Mono into oblivion immediately was a good sign - of course, but then their historical trend of influental buy-outs continued with the eventual aquisition of Xamarin...)

roblabla 5y ago

> Myself - I see the release of .NET as the point where Microsoft started to become more open, more platform-agnostic and more developer-friendly than it had ever been before. .NET certainly was more developer friendly, and I guess more open in a way by engaging with standardizing bodies. But more platform-agnostic? The original .NET (anything before dotnet) was very windows-centric. You couldn't take your .NET code and run it anywhere else. The C# language was ISO-certified, sure, but not the APIs. And C# without the APIs is quite uninteresting. MS only started being interested in platform agnosticism again in the last 3-4 years, because they aren't the dominant platform anymore in a few important verticals (servers and mobile). But for most of the previous decade, they have not cared at all about it.

jjkaczor 5y ago
Agree - the platform agnostic thing is only a recent reality - but, the "possibility" was there at the begining, and at the time the future seemed very bright. (The fact that they did not sue Mono into oblivion immediately was a good sign - of course, but then their historical trend of influental buy-outs continued with the eventual aquisition of Xamarin...)