.NET is dead. Long live .NET!!!!
The title is derived from the historic phrase " The King is dead. Long live the King! " signalling the immediate succession of a monarch. Yeah! .NET frameworks 1.0 and 1.1 are on their path towards extinction. The mainstream support by Microsoft has ended for .NET 1.0 and would end in October 2008 for .NET 1.1. Not to worry, a new bunch of leaders, read .NET 2.0, .NET 3.0 and .NET 3.5 have come to the fore now. The focus of this article would be to provide a brief history of various .NET frameworks and related technologies. Major (not all) technology releases in chronological order: 2002 .NET Framework 1.0 Visual Studio .NET 2002 (Rainier) C# 2003 .NET Framework 1.1 Visual Studio .NET 2003 (Everett) 2005 SQL Server 2005 Visual Studio 2005 (Whidbey) Team Foundation Server 2005 2006 .NET Framework 2.0 C# 2.0 ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 (initially ATLAS) ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit .NET Framework 3.0 (WinFX) 2007 .NET Framework 3.5 Visual Studio 2008 (Orcas) Team Foundation Server 2008 AS