Can you believe it?  It’s been 10 years since Microsoft publicly demoed the .Net Framework and languages at the 2000 PDC in Orlando.  Wow, we’ve come so far in just a short time.  Well, maybe not so short if you think about it.  Microsoft was cooking the concept for quite a while.  As great as the concept was, I think the key ingredient was when they brought Anders Hejlsbert on in 1996.   However, you have to remember that one of Anders’ first accomplishments was J++ and the Windows Foundation Classes.  That was soon eclipsed by what he achieved with C#.  And it just keeps getting better with 4.0!   With things like Named & Optional Parameters, Dynamic binding, Variance and better support for COM with COM specific features (dynamic operations are no longer dispatched by the C# runtime binder but instead by a special COM runtime binder which is shared among multiple languages!).  And that’s just the C# language!  We get a bevy of great stuff in the 4.0 Framework like In-Process Side-by-Side execution, managed APIs to more accurately monitor CPU and memory resources, BigInteger (FINALLY!!), memory mapped files, MEF, Parallel Computing (PLINQ), support for NAT, MVC, VisualStateManager, and the list goes on!  It’s been great so far and it’s only getting better so Happy Birthday .Net and we’re all looking to many more!

Happy Coding!