“Where do you want to go today?”

Robust computer programs may have got large number of lines of the code. It won’t be wrong to perceive the software development as an art or an outcome of the person’s common sense after attaining university graduation degree on the same. It has been a long and tough journey for many programming languages to attain the level of maturity they possess in today’s date. Since the first programming language was written there have been a lot of improvements in them which forms today’s version of it.

I started using Microsoft .NET v1.0 to get my software done since the very first day of my career or perhaps even before getting my final semester mark sheets in my hands. This relationship started getting deeper and deeper when I realized the potential of .NET framework on the windows platform. By now I was already bored writing my programs in a blue coloured turbo C++ (TC.exe) editor and COM+/MFC/Win32 applications using VC 6.0. I could remember the myth that was around that time narrating the excitement amongst the folks to see the newly invented .NET. Finally it came in the package of 4+1 (pre-requisite) CDs. Several versions of MSDN followed it.

.NET gave the uniformity in the coding methodology. Few well-known IDE features viz. intellisense and keyboard shortcuts was unaltered so as to facilitate its users to easily migrate to the new version of the Visual Studio. Unlike C++ and VC++, .NET has a standard way of achieving the functionality as the most of the plumbing is done internally by .NET framework. It could be described in brief as follows:

• Locate the appropriate namespace
• Locate the class and instantiate it
• Set the properties
• Execute the methods

With the invention of the new technology, as usual, people started looking for getting professional certifications from the vendor themselves. The vendors started introducing new courses to attract the brightest talent who wanted to grow in the same technology vertical. It was the time when the community just started putting their hands on .NET. It was no surprise when a fresher of that time was taking a print of CLR/.NET framework block diagram to paste it on the pin board near his cubicle. The most challenging task of that time was to create N-tier application which consists of UI, BLL, DAL and database. By the time .NET gained enough popularity, many websites came into existence which provided ready-made solutions to the common problems. It was just a matter of referring those when the developer was blocked on some technical issues related to implementation of the .NET framework in his application.

Several enterprises still feared to make .NET as the standard platform for their technical caterings due to the fear of instability of the newly invented framework. .NET evolved at a great pace since then. .NET v2.0 came with the new features which was just a dream for a developer prior to its existence. .NET v3.0, v3.5 and v4.0 followed the same trend. It won’t be a surprise if VS 6 will soon be put to end of life. At the same time it won’t be incorrect to say that Microsoft may not have made any significant changes to the lexical analyzer or the syntactical parsers for the compilers of .NET compliant programming languages to support their basic language constructs.

Along with the evolution of .NET there was a parallel development of the enterprise servers. MSSQL was chief amongst them which provided good support to enterprise database applications. Developers started developing the database applications with pleasure! At this point of time the organizations started thinking of migrating their legacy applications and port it to the new versions of .NET.

Just like a person never uses more than 5% of his brain in his entire life span, the enterprise software can’t use all the features of .NET framework in the single production release. Now .NET has gained a respectable position in the software market and the organizations have started accepting it unconditionally and faithfully. It won’t be a surprise when a .NET program implementing a solution of the command design pattern would prepare a tea/coffee/juice for you based on the parameters passed to its procedure from your iPhone mobile J

“Your potential. Our passion.”