Standard

Posted by

Posted on

January 9, 2014

Posted under

.NET, CodeProject

Comments

6 Comments

Why .NET is .NET !!!

Background

This was indeed asked by one interviewer to me, when I was in Final Year of my Engineering.

Funda

Microsoft.Net
The full Form of .NET is Network Enabled Technologies.
.Net is a Framework, which can be used in the development of any kind of application like…

  • Desktop Application
  • Web Application
  • Mobile Application

Research

So, let’s have a research on our main Topic.
According to Wikipedia…

Microsoft started development of .NET Framework in the late 1990s, originally under the name of Next Generation Windows Services (NGWS). By late 2000 the first beta versions of .NET 1.0 were released.

According to my research, it seems to be a Marketing and Branding Decision taken by Microsoft at that time.

When John Gage joined Sun Microsystems, he is credited with creating the phrase “The Network is the Computer”. So, if we think that .NET refers to Network, then it would not be wrong, as it was considered to be Microsoft‘s reaction to that statement. However, Microsoft was one step ahead to define “that statement” in a very “Productive Way”, which was going to create a “Software Development Revolution”.

Another aspect of the research reveals that Microsoft thought .NET could lessen the .COM mania.

Technical Aspect

Let’s give a thought to the Technical Aspect of the Nomenclature.
With .NET, we can create Web Services. The Framework makes life easier to write and consume Web Services. In this way, it has enhanced the Internet in terms of what it was doing and signifies the term Network in .NET. Anyone can access the Service from any platform and consume data to do operations. That was the main theme.

What I think?

Really does not matter, right?
Anyway, the Nomenclature is believed to be a gimmick, still I can’t ignore the Technical Aspect.

What you think?

It matters a lot. So, put your thoughts on this topic. Let’s discuss and find out the mystery.

6 thoughts on “Why .NET is .NET !!!”

  1. Hi Tadit,
    It’s an interesting topic to discuss.Let me add few lines which may throw some light on this.So
    .NET enabled Microsoft’s marketing people to emphasise the “Network”-ing aspect of its technologies, and was also a reaction to the marketing blitz by Sun Microsystems in the late 1990s whose theme was “The network is the computer”. The term “Dot-Com” was synonymous with the Internet that time, and “Dot-NET” was a play on that term.

    I don’t think it is a bad name at all, the problem was that Microsoft named so many products with the “.Net” nomenclature like .NET My Services and Microsoft .NET Enterprise Servers where the latter had nothing to do with the Internet. It caused so much confusion. Only later did Microsoft correct things by limiting the .NET name to technologies related to the Managed Runtime Framework.
    I have read this lines on a website,hope this will add value to discussion.

    Thanks
    Gitanjali

    Like

    Reply

    • Hey Alex,

      Thanks for reading the Blog. 🙂

      To learn about WPF, I would suggest you search on Google/Bing about articles. You will find many awesome ones.

      You can start MSDN articles, they are very informative. You can go though Code Project Articles also.

      Thanks,
      Tadit

      Like

      Reply

Leave a reply to Gitanjali Cancel reply