On this day in 2002, the first version of .Net framework was released. Now 17 years later to celebrate its birthday we’ve asked our colleague and a .Net guru Atanas Dragolov about his impressions and experience with the framework.
When did you start using the .NET framework?
I started my professional usage of the .NET framework back in 2002. I had some minor non-professional experience before that.
What was the first thing you built in .NET?
'Hello World', of course. The first professionally tested software I have created with the .NET framework was a web digital archiver. Back in those days, disk space was a problem and archivers were used but not commonly available as a web service.
What are you currently working on?
I am currently working as a part of a system integrations and operations team. The job involves glueing various technologies together and is not limited to the .NET Framework.
In your opinion how has .NET evolved over the years?
Through the years, .NET framework has always been in the top-3 list for me when developing backend applications and utility instruments. The framework has always provided improvements with each version - for example language flavours, sugars and functional programming expressiveness, performance improvements and the ability for fine-grained CPU utilization. The platform developers have also offered interesting sibling frameworks. For example, Xamarin for hybrid mobile applications development and Blazor for seamless integration with the modern browsers
The biggest evolution step for me, however, is the fact that the framework has been open sourced and most of the related toolkits are now available and stable across different platforms (.NET Standard). This has been quite rejuvenating for the community and the ecosystem of open source software based on .NET.
What are the main advantages of .NET?
My personal list is the following:
- .NET languages are quite easy to learn and application development is generally fast and efficient;
- The .NET platform provides a solid core of functionality and the necessary depth for most software development needs on both backend and frontend. Hybrid mobile applications development is also possible;
- The platform provides horizontal scalability for languages of different purpose (e.g. C#, F#);
- The framework releases are stable and well tested. In recent years I am seeing great improvements in the quality of the documentation, examples and the framework supplementary instruments;
- The platform has a huge community of contributors. Even the complex design and implementation problems have coverage in the community groups.