Twenty years ago Microsoft launched Visual Studio .NET and the first version of the .NET platform.
Inspired by the rise of the internet, and the shift towards distributed systems that communicated over it, .NET broke down barriers by supporting multiple languages with one runtime, and a set of libraries and APIs that were all compatible.
Since then, based on the feedback of the developer community,.Net has constantly innovated and evolved, and today over five million developers use .NET.
The platform has been crowned as the most loved framework by developers for three years in a row now – 2019, 2020, 2021, according to Stack Overflow’s developer survey.
Contributions from the community have also had a direct impact on performance, with .NET topping the TechEmpower performance benchmarks for years. There are hundreds of thousands of packages on NuGet built by the community, thousands of components and tools available from .NET ecosystem partners, and hundreds of .NET user groups worldwide helping local communities learn .NET. CNCF has also recognized .NET repositories in the top 30 highest velocity open-source projects on GitHub since 2017.
To celebrate the 20th anniversary of this impactful platform, Microsoft will be delivering a special celebration broadcast at 9:00am Pacific Time on www.dot.net. The event will be hosted by Scott Hunter, Scott Hanselman, and special guests will be sharing their stories and taking viewers on a journey of .NET’s past, present and future.
There are also many other events and celebrations happening in the community from Microsoft’s partners, MVPs, and others. Microsoft will also be offering digital memorabilia and are encouraging developers to share .Net their stories on Twitter with #dotNETLovesMe hashtag.
The future
When Microsoft made a major transformation towards open source, .NET was at the forefront. By 2012, they had fully open-sourced the ASP.NET MVC web framework and were accepting contributions. It was one of Microsoft’s first major open-source projects at the time. In 2014, they started to build a cross-platform and open-source .NET on GitHub and released the first version at the Red Hat DevNation conference in 2016 running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, something that would have been unheard of in the early days. Since then Microsoft has built strong partnerships with companies like Red Hat and IBM to bring .NET to RHEL, IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE, and more.
Microsoft just released .NET 6 in November 2021. With .NET 6 you now have a unified set of base libraries and SDK, a simplified development experience with investments in C# 10 and minimal APIs, high productivity with hot reload, and a whole lot more.
.NET 6 is the fasted adopted version of .NET yet, but Microsoft is already speeding ahead building .NET 7. Microsoft will be releasing.NET 7 Preview 1 this week and are excited to get the .NET Multi-platform App UI (.NET MAUI) release out the door soon. .NET MAUI will let developers build native apps for Windows, macOS, iOS and Android with a single codebase.
Find out more at www.dot.net here.
