Happy Birthday To The Code I Use Every Single Day, and Which Has Supported My Teaching and Research for Nearly 20Years: Meet .NET

“It was 20 years ago today, that Bill Gates taught the band to play”

Yesterday, was the 20th birthday of Microsoft .NET. And, so, I have a little secret. While you may think I spend my time coding for Python, Golang, Node.js and Rust, actually there’s a little bit of magic that allows me to present these things in an engaging way: Microsoft .NET. I thus say Happy Birthday to .NET, and here’s to the next amazing 20 years.

It was 20 years ago, today …

Where were you 20 years ago? For some of my students, they weren’t even born. For me, it was an exciting time as the computing-focused academics from the schools of engineering and electrical engineering were merged into the School of Computing at Edinburgh Napier [here]:

I basically had a Web site that I thought — at the time — looked good, but it looks horrible by today’s standards. My main teaching at the time was CNDS (Computer Networks and Distributed Systems) and NOS (Network Operating Systems):