20+ Years of .NET and Me

I realized this weekend that I’ve worked with .NET now for over 20 years. During the Thanksgiving week of 2002 when it was unusually quiet in the office because most folks were out, I spent three enjoyable days learning about the new .NET runtime and C# to build out a proof of concept for replacing a very problematic VB6 and Oracle PL/SQL system at my then company.

That PoC didn’t go anywhere of course, but the new development model as a replacement for VB6 COM components was surely exciting at the time for reasons that feel pretty quaint now (real stack traces! actual inheritance! garbage collection instead of reference counting!).

Granted, I was pretty horrified the first time I had to use WebForms on a real project because that felt like such a big step backward from ASP Classic to me at the time, but it was still an exciting time. I remember reading about Project Indigo (what became WCF) and thinking it sounded like a fantastic solution to some problems we’d struggled to solve with our earlier tools — then hardly ever used WCF after all that excitement.

I’ve certainly done development in other platforms here and there, but never really made any kind of serious move to get off of .NET, partially or mostly because of my time investment in OSS tools on .NET.

Anyway, there’s no real point to this blog post other than the Thanksgiving week and .NET Conf last week made me think about my first initial foray into .NET. For all the stumbles along the way and years of angst about feeling like I was in a 2nd class development community and platform, I think .NET is substantially better right now as a result of the .NET Core wave of initiatives than it ever has been and hopefully has a bright future since I’m still making a big career bet on it!