D vs. C#

[JohnC]

"Bill Baxter" <dnewsgroup at billbaxter.com> wrote in message 
news:ekd9kg$1e89$1 at digitaldaemon.com...
> Dave wrote:
>> Bill Baxter wrote:
>>> Unknown W. Brackets wrote:
>>>
>>>> Also, I disagree with your comments on C#; I don't believe it was 
>>>> designed as the way to access the framework.  In fact, I think .NET 
>>>> smells much stronger of Visual Basic .NET than of C#.  But that's 
>>>> really an opinion.
>>>
>>> And the smell of "NotJava .NET" is pretty strong too.
>>>
>>> --bb
>>
>> Funny thing is, I think that most of the runtime and big chunks of the 
>> .NET library can trace their roots back to MS Visual J++ <g>
>>
>> Was .NET announced before or after Sun won the judgement? (I can't 
>> remember). It may turn out that MS lost the battle but won the war on 
>> that one, if losing Java was the impetus for .NET anyhow.
>
> It was definitely round about the same time Sun was suing them over their 
> non-standard extensions to Java.  I think folks at Microsoft liked Java 
> the language, but if Sun wasn't going to let them add COM extensions and 
> win32 APIs and such, then it was never going to be a viable replacement 
> for VB.  So they did what they had to do in my view. C# .NET seems to be a 
> pretty sweet thing for anyone willing to swallow the Microsoft Kool-aid.
>
> --bb

Almost right. It was really the virtual machine that Microsoft was 
interested in. The JVM team felt increasingly stifled by Sun, and wanted to 
take the VM places it couldn't go (whether for legal or other reasons). 
Ambitions for multiple-language support, plus deeper interoperation with COM 
and native code, motivated them to join forces with the existing COM team.

COM 2.0 was born ... but it was a brief marriage. Apparently they fell out 
over how they should implement memory management. One half wanted to 
continue with explicit management (reference counting via AddRef/Release) 
while the other was interested in garbage collection. So they parted 
company. Soon, the GC guys gave birth to the CLR (acquiring a company who'd 
developed a research VM along the way).

Meanwhile, the C++ team was investigating meta data. With the new CLR team, 
they developed Microsoft Intermediate Language, and soon had a prototype GC 
and runtime. All they needed now was a language. C# started life in the late 
nineties as the weird offspring of C++ and IDL. It was codenamed "Cool" 
(C-based Object Oriented Language).

C# was announced in mid-2000 along with .NET (which grew out of ASP+), and 
the first public release followed in 2002.

Now, where'd I put that bottle of Kool Aid?