.NET: That old technology?
Looking through today's MSDN blog entries in RSS Bandit I noticed a post (which shall remain unlinked) where an MSFT employee mentioned he had been working on some aspect of .NET in 1997. Yeah, that's 1997. We must assume that the project itself must have started even before that since they were hiring in 1997 - so that would be 1996? Whoa. Remember 1996? Remember the web in 1996? Office 95? VB5? Whoa...
Now, there were a lot of rumors about whatever was going on at the time with Microsoft's development platform strategy and direction. Some of us recall the one about "Cool", a new language that would replace VJ++, VB/VBA, VC++ and just about everything else. I remember hearing about this in 1998 from (I think) Robert Scoble, who at the time was also an active poster in the new defunct DevX off.ramp newsgroup (he didn't work for Microsoft back then, obviously). This later proved to be C#.
The first inkling I had of .NET as the "next big thing" came in early 2000. In September of that same year (IIRC), Microsoft announced .NET at the PDC; I clearly remember getting a beta of the framework in October. In March of 2001 most of the VB MVPs were flown to Redmond to get the "inside scoop" on the changes to the language - that was also the first time I used Visual Studio.NET, which was still in alpha and crashed with the now famous "Lame!" message box.
And of course, VS.NET actually went gold in mid-2002.
So, amazingly enough (if my assumption is correct) this means that .NET was in the cooker for at least 4 years or so before it was officially unveiled, and that there were people working on .NET at the time Visual Studio 6 (also called VS98) was being released. So for all practical purposes we can say that .NET is actually 8 years old? That's mind-boggling. I wonder if anyone from Microsoft could confirm or deny that.
