In June 2000, Microsoft announced a new generation of software that Bill Gates called "the most important transition since we moved from DOS to Windows." And the world mostly just snickered and said, "Yeah, right." To the developers in the crowd, .NET sounded like just another fancy marketing wrapper around the same Microsoft suite of technologies we were already familiar with -- OLE/ActiveX/COM/DNA, with extra reliance on XML. We'd all been through these announcements before.

I was curious enough about this new development to attend the Microsoft Professional Developer's Conference (PDC), where Microsoft promised to deliver the details. Sure, the Web Forms and Web Services in VisualStudio.NET, which I'd already seen, are intriguing; and the promise of true object-oriented inheritance in Visual Basic is interesting. But the most significant software technology transition in the last nine years? I was hoping for more. And I was totally blown away.

Discover .NET

Buried beneath all the .NET hype is, in fact, a core of new technology that's much deeper, more revolutionary, and more brilliant than what anyone I talked to at the conference was expecting -- millions of lines of code, written in a new state-of-the-art programming language, C# (pronounced "see sharp"), sitting on top of a completely new runtime architecture. No registry entries, no GUIDs, and XCopy deployment -- just copy a set of files into a directory to install new software, and delete the files if you want to uninstall. There's sophisticated role-based security at every level and performance improvements of 300 percent. Classes created in just about any language can be inherited and extended in other languages. The framework supports complete interoperability with existing software and COM+ services, and smooth scalability across multiple servers and multiple processors on each server. There's no interruption of service and no reboots required to install new versions -- just copy your new DLL over an old one while the app is running. The Common Language Runtime provides advanced compilation, security, memory management, exception handling, version control and interoperability, no matter which supported language you choose to program in.

ASP+, the next generation of Active Server Pages, uses compiled code and allows easy creation of Web Services that any software on the Internet can use. Server Controls in ASP+ automatically get rendered differently for different browsers and devices. VisualStudio.NET provides a lush, new language-agnostic programming and debugging environment. Visual XML tools automatically turn data into objects. And ADO+ has a full complement of powerful new XML-enabled data objects, like the DataSet, which automatically shreds hierarchical XML into an in-memory, batch-updatable cache of related tables. Future versions of SQL Server will be deeply integrated with the language runtime to let you add procedures, triggers, functions, and even data types written in any supported language. These code assemblies will be stored inside the database, with full participation in security, backups, query optimization, and debugging.

And VB will be a first-class language on equal footing with C# in what it can accomplish.

The Internet has turned out to be a magnificent dragon. Every piece of software written now must be prepared to run 24X7 and to handle thousands of users. And it has to be able to share its data and services with every other piece of software in the world without compromising security. To tame this dragon, a magical sword is needed -- one that can make magnificent swordsmen of us all.

You may remember Anders Hejlsberg. He wrote Turbo Pascal and went on to architect what many have called the best language ever for creating Windows applications -- Delphi. In 1996, Anders' buddy from Borland, Brad Silverberg, convinced him to come to Microsoft. Anders was one of the original visionary swordsmiths who came together in 1997 to plan and build what has become the .NET Common Language Runtime, and he designed C# to give you the power of C++, without all the headaches. Eventually, the team grew to over a hundred developers. I asked Anders if there are any plans to port the runtime to other platforms besides Windows, expecting the usual "I can't comment on future products," but Anders answered, "The framework is architected to support it." In fact, Microsoft is now creating a second version of the framework to run on compact devices -- .NET Compact.

Early adopters are already building real products on the .NET framework. Merrill Lynch is using C# and Web Services to re-engineer their private-client site, which provides full investment services to five million online customers and is projected to support 25 million. American Express has already built a Web Service that provides credit card authorizations. The Microsoft.com search page is already in production using ASP+. (To spot examples on the Web, look for URLs that end in .aspx rather than .asp.)

While I'm usually skeptical of new products and promised functionality, what I saw at PDC was convincing. Check out the http://www.IBuySpy.com site, which some Microsoft developers threw together quickly as a fun sample. On MSDN, there's a more complex example, Duwamish Books, which was migrated from DNA to .NET. And, of course, Advisor will bring you articles and conference sessions on the .NET technologies and products.

Change is the curse and blessing of this business. As soon as you start feeling competent, a new tool or language makes you into a beginner all over again. But, occasionally, something comes along that you can't wait to get your hands on. I feel that way about .NET. The underlying technology is too well crafted and too easily extensible to do anything but thrive.