Determining exactly what .Net is may be the hardest part of measuring its success. The confusion goes way back to June 2000, when Bill Gates framed the .Net initiative in consumerish terms as an Internet "platform" to support all sorts of devices. As it turned out, .Net mainly manifested itself as a collection of technologies for developers, and that's how we have chosen to evaluate it. Microsoft's real goals were many and ambitious. At the core of .Net, the CLR (Common Language Runtime) and its associated Framework (class library) would usher Microsoft developers into the world of managed code, of which the benefits were already well-known to their Java counterparts. In parallel, Web services would become the pivotal integration technology, and XML the lingua franca of data representation.
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