C# in Depth

A brief history of C# (and related technologies)19Java is reasonably portable, despite the “write once, debug everywhere” skit on Sun’scatchphrase of “write once, run anywhere.” The idea of letting coders develop enterpriseJava applications on Windows with friendly IDEs and then deploy (without evenrecompiling) to powerful Unix servers was a compelling proposition—and clearlysomething of a threat to Microsoft.Microsoft created their own Java Virtual Machine (JVM), which had reasonableperformance and a very fast startup time, and even released an IDE for it, named J++.However, they introduced incompatible extensions into their platform, and Sun suedMicrosoft for violating licensing terms, starting a very long (and frankly tedious) legalbattle. The main impact of this legal battle was felt long before the case was concluded—whilethe rest of the world moved on to Java 1.2 and beyond, Microsoft’s versionof Java stayed at 1.1, which made it effectively obsolete pretty rapidly. It was clearthat whatever Microsoft’s vision of the future was, Java itself was unlikely to be a majorpart of it.In the same period, Microsoft’s Active Server Pages (ASP) gained popularity too.After an initial launch in December 1996, two further versions were released in 1997and 2000. ASP made dynamic web development much simpler for developers onMicrosoft servers, and eventually third parties ported it to non-Windows platforms.Despite being a great step forward in the Windows world, ASP didn’t tend to promotethe separation of presentation logic, business logic, and data persistence, which mostof the vast array of Java web frameworks encouraged.1.2.2 C# and .NET are bornC# and .NET were properly unveiled at the Professional Developers Conference(PDC) in July 2000, although some elements had been preannounced before then,and there had been talk about the same technologies under different names(including COOL, COM3, and Lightning) for a long time. Not that Microsoft hadn’tbeen busy with other things, of course—that year also saw both Windows Me andWindows 2000 being released, with the latter being wildly successful compared withthe former.Microsoft didn’t “go it alone” with C# and .NET, and indeed when the specificationsfor C# and the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) were submitted toECMA (an international standards body), they were co-sponsored by Hewlett-Packardand Intel along with Microsoft. ECMA ratified the specification (with some modifications),and later versions of C# and the CLI have gone through the same process. C#and Java are “open” in different ways, with Microsoft favoring the standardizationpath and Sun gradually open sourcing Java and allowing or even encouraging otherJava runtime environments. There are alternative CLI and C# implementations, themost visible being the Mono project, 5 but they don’t generally implement the wholeof what we think of as the .NET Framework. Commercial reliance on and support5http://www.mono-project.comLicensed to Rhona Hadida