.NET is an open-source developer platform created by Microsoft for building many different types of applications, such as web, mobile, desktop, games, etc. It consists of different tools, programming languages, and libraries. Let’s start with a brief history of the .NET.

The History Behind .NET

During 1990s, Microsoft started to work on something called the .NET Strategy. The key point of this strategy was to encompass all Microsoft products and add .NET to existing product names. In the 2000s, .NET framework was known as the Next Generation Windows Services (NGWS). The first beta versions of the .NET framework were released in the late 2000s, and the first version of .NET 1.0 was released on February 13, 2002. Since then, many versions were released with new features. Some of the most important were:

• .NET Framework 2.0 (November 2005.): generic collections, iterators, nullable types, etc.
• .NET Framework 3.0 (November 2006.): WPF, WCF and WWF.
• .NET Framework 3.5 (November 2007.): AJAX, LINQ, ASP.NET MVC.
• .NET Framework 4.0 (April 2010.): MEF, DLR, task parallel library, Razor view engine, new C#/VB language features.
• .NET Framework 4.5 (August 2012.): support for Async, zip compression support.
• .NET Core 1.0 (November, 2014.): first version which included cross-platform support. ASP.NET 5 and .NET Native.
• .NET Core 2.0 (August 2017.): the second version, with major performance improvements and implemented .NET Standard 2.0.
• .NET Framework 4.8 (April 2019.): final version included JIT enhancements, High DPI enhancements for WPF applications, accessibility improvements, performance updates, and security enhancements.
• .NET Core 3.0 (September 2019.): performance improvements, C## 8.0 new features, implements .NET Standard 2.1. Windows Desktop supports .NET Core for Windows Forms and WPF.

#.net #visual studio #.net core #.net framework