20th Anniversary of .NET! Microsoft issued a document to celebrate

This past Valentine's Day, the .NET team held a big event to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the .NET community. That's right! .NET was launched with Visual-Studio on February 13, 2002, and this month finally celebrated its 20th anniversary.

On February 13, Microsoft officially released a post on the community blog to celebrate the 20th anniversary of .NET. In this article, Microsoft reviewed the development process of .NET in the past 20 years, made an inventory analysis of the progress made in recent years and major time nodes, and also made an outlook on the development plan of the community in the future.

In a blog post, Microsoft said that on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of .NET (and Visual-Studio), they sincerely invite developers and netizens to participate in a special celebration on February 14th at 9:00 am on www.dot. Looking forward to seeing the stories you share on Twitter under the #dotNETLovesMe thread.

.NET 20 years: Microsoft has become a pioneer in the "Internet era"

According to the StavePoad developer survey data, .NET, as a platform launched 20 years ago, has topped the "Developers' Favorite Framework" list for three consecutive years in 2019, 2020, and 2021. This is very surprising. Even CNCF (full name Cloud Native Computing Foundation Cloud Native Computing Foundation) also have to admit this. Today, more than 5 million developers use the .NET community.

It is reported that .NET is one of the 30 fastest-growing open source projects on GitHub since 2017, which also shows from the side that everyone is actively improving the platform every day. Of course, community contributions also have a direct impact on performance, such as .NET leading the TechEmpower performance benchmark for many years. The community has also built hundreds of thousands of packages, thousands of components and tools, and hundreds of .NET ecosystem partners on NuGet to attract global users to grow with .NET.

Over the years, Microsoft has stayed true to its deep developer roots, bringing innovation to users around the world. In the 1990s, Microsoft became the leading system provider of personal computer operating systems with the Basic interpreter and MS-DOS. With a huge portfolio of development tools, there are many different tools and languages to build a variety of applications. While each tool is good at solving different problems, it is difficult for applications to communicate across them, especially across machine boundaries.

Then with the rise of the Internet, the world began to see an easier way to share information. Technology is starting to transform in the direction of distributed systems communicating over the Internet, and .NET was born for this Internet revolution: multiple languages, one runtime, and a set of compatible libraries and APIs. It can be said that "it is the emergence of .NET that puts Microsoft at the forefront of the transformation of the "Internet Age"".

Even in the face of Microsoft's new big change - open source, .NET still leads the way. As early as 2012, Microsoft has completely open sourced the ASP.NET MVC network framework and accepted donations, which was one of Microsoft's earliest large-scale open source projects at that time.

In 2014, Microsoft started building a cross-platform, open-source .NET on GitHub and released the first version at the 2016 Red Hat DevNation conference, demonstrating it running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which was also an early success. Innovative move.

Of course, .NET isn't just for the Windows platform, and Microsoft now has strong partnerships with companies like Red Hat and IBM to achieve new goals. In addition, Microsoft .NET has a number of partnerships with other commercial and community distributions.

Looking to the future: .NET 7 is coming

In November 2021, Microsoft just released the .NET 6 version and is going all-in on .NET 7 (in fact .Net 7 Preview 1 will be released this week). Even .NET 6 now has a unified set of basic libraries and SDKs, which not only simplifies the development experience, invests in C#10, but also provides a minimal API that can be "hot reloaded" Realize high productivity, etc.

Microsoft also revealed that the .NET Multiplatform Application User Interface (.NET MAUI) will be released soon. NET MAUI will allow users to build native applications for Windows, macOS, iOS and Android using a single code base. The focus now is on quality and bugs, so Microsoft is now trying to preview the version and expects feedback from users at that time.

Finally, Microsoft said with emotion: ".NET has come a long way in the past 20 years, but the original vision of changing developers' lives still holds true. You can build any type of application for any operating system with excellent performance. From high throughput From volume, cloud-scale services down to the smallest microcontroller, the .NET community has made this platform and its large ecosystem a huge success, so a big thank you to all developers and users."

If you're interested in Microsoft's February 14th celebration on www.dot, check out the #dotNETLovesMe thread on Twitter for all the information. If you have ideas on this topic, you are also welcome to exchange and interact in the comment area.