How Open Source changed .NET forever

Lately, things are getting confusing. There’s .NET Framework, there’s .NET Core, and there’s .NET. They’re all pretty much the same, but they are very much different.

It all began with the .NET Framework in 2002. In the past twenty years software changed our society. Individuals and businesses rely on software much more than back in 2002. Software development as a profession has changed too. The typical software development is much more eager to share the knowledge of their profession with other software developers than in 2002.

.NET development changed over the years. .NET has become a community rather than the programming language some thought it to be. .NET Framework and .NET Core/.NET are very different things.

This article describes how .NET Framework, and thus the job of the average .NET developer has evolved over the past twenty years. Let’s take a quick trip down memory lane:

How the .NET Framework came to be

It all started in 2002. Before 2002 building things with a Microsoft programming language was no picnic... Instead of .NET we had Visual Basic for a programming language. It was possible to build websites with it too, that was called ASP. It worked, but PHP and Java were superior to it, and more and more developers moved away from Microsoft programming languages.

So, in 2002 Microsoft introduced the .NET Framework. A far more powerful application framework designed to be easily adopted…