Microsoft .Net report card
Comp. World | at | by Mike
Microsoft's real goals were many and ambitious. At the core of .Net, the CLR (Common Language Runtime) and its associated Framework (class library) would usher Microsoft developers into the world of managed code, of which the benefits were already well-known to their Java counterparts. In parallel, Web services would become the pivotal integration technology, and XML the lingua franca of data representation.
These were, and still are, the central themes. Don Box, architect of Longhorn's Indigo communication subsystem, put it plainly on his Weblog: "We're betting that the future is managed code and XML."