how .net came into existence

Question

how .net introduced in the market ?

Vulpes · Answer

.NET was first introduced in February 2002 with the release of Visual Studio .NET 2002 though it had been in beta since mid-2000. It was originally going to be called Next Generation Web Services (NGWS) and I have an old C# book which refers to it as such. The impetus behind .NET was to create an easy to use object oriented environment which could be supported by multiple languages. Microsoft developed C# specially for the purpose and also provided VB.NET and Managed Extensions for C++ which would run on the platform. It also provided large standard libraries in the form of the .NET Framework which was mostly written in C#. Microsoft needed an answer to Java which dealt with its perceived shortcomings and also wanted to provide a programming environment which would be more object oriented than VB but easier to use than C++. As in the case of Java .NET source code was converted by the compiler into an intermediate byte code (Microsoft Intermediate language or IL) which ran under the control of a virtual machine (the Common Language Runtime or CLR) and was converted 'on the fly' to native code for the underlying platform (Just In Time compilation or JIT). Memory management was taken care of by the CLR which used a garbage collector to clean up objects to which there were no longer any references.