20 Years of .Net

Two decades of .NET. I started writing .NET while in college. Its release was exciting to most of my professors. Where I saw it replacing a few Java courses. Not in a bad way that Java didn’t have its place. But a new alternative. I started learning Java. Had no issue with it, and at the time it was all I knew. But, like my professors I there was some excitement with .NET.

.NET started much different than Java. It wasn’t one language any platform. It was a language and a framework for one platform. But my transition to it wasn’t because it was better. It was the market I was in. .NET became very popular and quick with the business in the region I was living in, North East Ohio. Sure, there was and still are Java shops. But, .NET was prominent.

My first job after college was a .NET shop. Small consulting firm building political websites and campaign sites. Sure we had a few classic ASP sites. But most where .NET web apps. And as any new developer I started off making modifications to existing site. Where the first site I built on my own was a campaign site for Bob Corker in his run for Senate. Didn’t know much of the candidate at the time. But, I was so happy to say I built this, and it was in .NET.

One of the coolest projects I was part of was a rewrite of a .NET application. Well, it was a little more than that. There was an Angular front end, two mobile apps (iOS and Android). But the backend was .NET Framework 4.x. We were not only rewriting it to .NET Core but we were deploying this to PCF. This is where the cloud bug bit. At the time I didn’t realize this was very new for .NET. Our team was doing some bleeding edge development in .NET with Pivotal Cloud Foundry.

Over these 20 years many of us have experiences like mine. Well, at least I hope you have. What started as closed source project is now fairly open source. Which is a big transition for any company to do. The transition was not only opening up the code but changing the way it ran. .NET is now running on more than just Windows. We, are deploying to containers, and Linux. Something I would never have seen 20 years ago or even 10 years ago.

All in all I am one of the many people who’s career has changed because of .NET. This gave me some pause to think about this. I know .NET isn’t perfect and hasn’t been in the past. But, as it pushes forward I am hoping it will keep the change it drives in the ecosystem. The .NET vs Java jabs are still there. They don’t burn as much as they did before. Now I look at it more like this, “.NET and Java”.