10 years ago today, Microsoft promised to build "the next generation Internet." The occasion was Forum 2000, where Microsoft's Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer announced.NET, now one of the most popular frameworks used by software developers.
.NET seems like it has been around forever now, but on June 22, 2000, Ballmer mentioned the word ".NET" a whopping 62 times in his keynote address as he made his case to software developers.
"What is .NET?" Ballmer said. ".NET represents a set, an environment, a programming infrastructure that supports the next generation of the Internet as a platform. ... It is also, though, and Bill [Gates] made the analogy, I think, with Windows here pretty well for its day, .NET is also a user environment, a set of fundamental user services that live on the client, in the server, in the cloud, that are consistent with and build off that programming model. So, it's both a user experience and a set of developer experiences, that's the conceptual description of what is .NET."
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