.NET is not an invention but is an accidental discovery by the VB enhances team working within Microsoft. In the begin all they wanted to have a component that would cover the memory leaks found in VB version 6. By investing time and resources towards researching for a tool, they have realized the concept of the Garbage Collector. So, the first point that is evolved towards the .NET is the GC to manage the resources. Hence, the word Managed Code evolved. Later the different components like JIT evolved. This is a long story, to cut it short we have the version 1 of .NET with common language compatibility and the MSIL has been the Intermediate language for runtime compilation.
Thus, the version 1 is totally concentrated on the term “Managed Code”, thus CLR is the initial theme of .NET. There are few drawbacks and limitations which couldn’t work with the large scaled application development. Major of the limitations are resolved and a new extension for v1 is releases as v1.1 and this became the first stable runtime for .NET framework
v1 / v1.1 = Managed Code
No company would be idle with the successful release. They would definitely be working towards the new features as well as some extra features that can be added to the current version to make it much better. Especially Microsoft being the pioneer in development of programming languages, we could expect that they foresee the new trends and the industry standards. As a result, they have worked towards the next version of .NET and this time their main concentration is about making the class entity towards extensible to the maximum possible. Thus, I consider that they have introduced the “Partial” keyword to extend the visibility of the class into many files. Apart of this, I also think that Generics is the main concept of this version.
v2 = Generics
By this time, .NET started grabbing the industry position and became more stable development as well as faster development environment for many of the industry leaders to adopt the .NET as their primary programming platform. The programmers has become more intelligent and started developing large scaled applications. This is also the time for the service oriented architecture evolved and Business Investors started fancy about this buzz word, SOA, ie., Service Oriented Architecture. Basically .NET is built to be loosely coupled entities and the Investors started visualizing the new kind of applications with SOA, there evolved a concept of unknown type entities. Hence the keyword “Anonymous” has become the key theme for the next version. Microsoft has taken a huge leap at this junction, which they couldn’t jump. Resulted a failure of version 3.0 and an interim patches are released. Windows Work Flow / Windows Presentation Foundation / Windows Communication Foundation are also part of version 3, but later they have evolved as individual entities. The R&D team also shed some light in LINQ, for all these the main key word is the Anonymous. Thus, the new version 3.5 is released with an ideology behind the “Anonymous” Keyword. Examples for anonymous are, anonymous methods, anonymous objects, anonymous delegates, etc.,
V3.5 = Anonymous
Am not exploring much about the latest version, but all I’ve read from various blogs is that the theme for the framework 4 is “Parallel”. This key word is mostly used as parallel processing, parallel computing, co-existence, coherence, etc.,
V4 = Parallel
What the readers think of my understanding towards each theme verses each version?
