4 ms·

I worked at a company that was a sometime-partner of Microsoft in its efforts to get other languages running on the CLR. You have to understand that Microsoft

by neilk 15y ago

I worked at a company that was a sometime-partner of Microsoft in its efforts to get other languages running on the CLR. You have to understand that Microsoft had spent most of the 90s being clueless about the internet. Then actively trying to kill it. But by 2001, their strategy was to embrace and extend internet protocols and technologies so they would be forever tied to Microsoft. My impression was that .NET was a marketing term for a number of unrelated technologies that all served this overarching goal, that all came out roughly around 2001. They were saying to big corporations, that your choice wasn't Microsoft versus the internet, Microsoft WAS the internet. Only better. C# and the CLR were there to counter Java and the JVM. Their concept of Web Services was to make web technologies a mere transport layer for an RPC protocol called SOAP, which you would build with Microsoft IDEs. Hailstorm and Passport were an attempt to make Microsoft the centralized broker for all sensitive information on the internet. Think Facebook Connect, only imagine it was more corporate and business focused, and knew your credit card number. Anyway, Hailstorm/Passport and Web Services are dead, but The ".NET Framework" lives on in the CLR and C#, which were actually rather good even apart from Microsoft's strategizing.

fhars 15y ago
Your impression sounds plausible. I have always seen .NET as a me-too marketing reaction to Sun's cheesy "we are the dot in .com" (as for example on the first slide of this 1999 ppt presentation on the future of java: http://www.java-forum-stuttgart.de/jfs/1999/folien/B7_Jim_Constantine/B7_Jim_Constantine.ppt http://www.java-forum-stuttgart.de/jfs/1999/folien/B7_Jim_Co... )
- neilk 15y ago
  I doubt it's a reaction - it was just that, at the time, a domain name was a symbol of newness, coolness, and gobs of money. "blahblahblah.com" was something that even the most clueless IT executive knew meant "the internet". So both companies would want to exploit that.
savrajsingh 15y ago
Fun fact: office 2003 was originally designed around these APIs, and it was planned as a cloud offering. The world just wasn't ready for it back then.
- DavidAbrams 15y ago
  But now that people are more gullible, it seems like a fine idea.
narcissus 15y ago
It's funny that you should mention their cluelessness of the web at the start. I remember when .NET was first released, my first question was "wow, how do they ever expect me to find that in a search engine?!?" Search engines were a little dumber back then :)
- TazeTSchnitzel 15y ago
  "dot net"
  - narcissus 15y ago
    ... is fine now. It wasn't at the time, for me at least. It truly was difficult for a lot of people to search for anything on it.
- icebraining 15y ago
  C♯ isn't much better, since IIRC search engines often ignored special characters.
- DavidAbrams 15y ago
  Companies are STILL pulling moronic moves like that. Cooke, a cinema-camera-lens company, decided to call their electronically coupled lens technology "/i". Yes a slash with an "i" after it. Try searching on THAT.
BrianLy 15y ago
There were likely considerations that fed in at different levels of the process: 1. Higher-ups who still believed that they could offer a platform that would be more valuable than the internet at large. Hailstorm always felt like an AOL for web services. 2. Lower down in the MS hierarchy various areas were under pressure. They had technologies built on COM and Win32 that had been thrown together quickly as a response to the growth of the web. eg. IIS and COM+. Both had problems in terms of scalability (and security as exploited later) and there is was no way to improve performance without jumping down to C++. Obviously there were a lot of other issues with these tools and a "rewrite" was needed. Microsoft were really playing catch-up here and "copying" various things from the JVM ecosystem such as garbage collection was required. It is worth reviewing Brian Harry's note re: reference counting. A large number of developers were concerned with the implications of this change but it was for the better (for more people - there is still no perfect solution here). C# appears to the uninformed to be a mere copy of the Java language but Microsoft included features to attract some C++ developers, help the transition, and improve usability over Java. SOAP is an abomination, but it is still better than DCOM which came before. I think Rotor was one of the most valuable things that Microsoft produced in the early years of .NET. Ted Neward et al wrote a book on it with O'Reilly and an unpublished 2nd version is at http://callvirt.net/blog/post/SSCLI-20-Patch-for-VS-2010.aspx http://callvirt.net/blog/post/SSCLI-20-Patch-for-VS-2010.asp.... You may not want to look at Rotor if you contribute to Mono-based projects.

by neilk 15y ago

fhars 15y ago

Your impression sounds plausible. I have always seen .NET as a me-too marketing reaction to Sun's cheesy "we are the dot in .com" (as for example on the first slide of this 1999 ppt presentation on the future of java: http://www.java-forum-stuttgart.de/jfs/1999/folien/B7_Jim_Constantine/B7_Jim_Constantine.ppt http://www.java-forum-stuttgart.de/jfs/1999/folien/B7_Jim_Co... )

neilk 15y ago
I doubt it's a reaction - it was just that, at the time, a domain name was a symbol of newness, coolness, and gobs of money. "blahblahblah.com" was something that even the most clueless IT executive knew meant "the internet". So both companies would want to exploit that.

savrajsingh 15y ago

Fun fact: office 2003 was originally designed around these APIs, and it was planned as a cloud offering. The world just wasn't ready for it back then.

DavidAbrams 15y ago
But now that people are more gullible, it seems like a fine idea.

narcissus 15y ago

It's funny that you should mention their cluelessness of the web at the start. I remember when .NET was first released, my first question was "wow, how do they ever expect me to find that in a search engine?!?" Search engines were a little dumber back then :)

TazeTSchnitzel 15y ago
"dot net"
- narcissus 15y ago
  ... is fine now. It wasn't at the time, for me at least. It truly was difficult for a lot of people to search for anything on it.
icebraining 15y ago
C♯ isn't much better, since IIRC search engines often ignored special characters.
DavidAbrams 15y ago
Companies are STILL pulling moronic moves like that. Cooke, a cinema-camera-lens company, decided to call their electronically coupled lens technology "/i". Yes a slash with an "i" after it. Try searching on THAT.

BrianLy 15y ago

There were likely considerations that fed in at different levels of the process: 1. Higher-ups who still believed that they could offer a platform that would be more valuable than the internet at large. Hailstorm always felt like an AOL for web services. 2. Lower down in the MS hierarchy various areas were under pressure. They had technologies built on COM and Win32 that had been thrown together quickly as a response to the growth of the web. eg. IIS and COM+. Both had problems in terms of scalability (and security as exploited later) and there is was no way to improve performance without jumping down to C++. Obviously there were a lot of other issues with these tools and a "rewrite" was needed. Microsoft were really playing catch-up here and "copying" various things from the JVM ecosystem such as garbage collection was required. It is worth reviewing Brian Harry's note re: reference counting. A large number of developers were concerned with the implications of this change but it was for the better (for more people - there is still no perfect solution here). C# appears to the uninformed to be a mere copy of the Java language but Microsoft included features to attract some C++ developers, help the transition, and improve usability over Java. SOAP is an abomination, but it is still better than DCOM which came before. I think Rotor was one of the most valuable things that Microsoft produced in the early years of .NET. Ted Neward et al wrote a book on it with O'Reilly and an unpublished 2nd version is at http://callvirt.net/blog/post/SSCLI-20-Patch-for-VS-2010.aspx http://callvirt.net/blog/post/SSCLI-20-Patch-for-VS-2010.asp.... You may not want to look at Rotor if you contribute to Mono-based projects.