.NET History

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30 points·aragonite··3 comments

This focuses on recent history (eg, .Net Core, deprecation of Xamarin, unification, etc.) I had hoped it would focus on the older history of .Net: how it got started, what was in .Net 1 and 2, etc.

There are a lot of stories around Microsoft people sending limousines to sit outside the Borland office to headhunt specific developers, or how WinForms was a clone of Delphi's VCL. (I have heard these stories directly from people who were there at the time.) This kind of history fascinates me.

I'd love to see these as more than oral history, written down.

See Ext-VOS design, it was supposed to be the the evolution of COM, using J++ as the main language.

Windows Forms start as Windows Foundation Classes on J++, as did P/Invoke (J/Direct in J++), and Delphi like events.

Then the lawsuit happened, Ext-VOS adapted an language being designed at MSR named COOL, which became C#.

In the process, J# made the transition easier for existing J++ code bases.

Years later, with COM at the steering wheel from WinDev as the main API model, the Ext-VOS idea was revisited as WinRT.

https://fsharp.org/history/hopl-final/hopl-fsharp.pdf

https://news.microsoft.com/1997/12/10/microsoft-gives-java-d...

https://www.qbd.com.au/programming-windows-with-java-and-wfc...

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/iis/6.0-... https://arstechnica.com/features/2012/10/windows-8-and-winrt...

Half of this is just the re-naming. It's like reading 'history' thats a list of names. And it doesn't seem like its changed with the open, modern 'core' components.

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