Microsoft’s Jason Zander comments on my piece on the early history of ASP.NET:
- The CLR was actually built out of the COM+ team as an incubation starting in late 1996. At first we called it the “Component Object Runtime” or COR. That’s why several of the unmanaged DLL methods and environment variables in the CLR start with the Cor prefix.
- There were several language projects underway at the start. The C++ and languages teams both had ideas (Cool was one of them), and in the CLR we wrote Simple Managed C or SMC (pronounced ‘smack’). We actually wrote the original BCL in SMC.
He says these are corrections though they seem more like supplementary information to me. I don’t have any inside knowledge of this history other than what people who should know say to me (though I do also have my own recollections of what was said publicly). He may be reacting to the idea that the CLR came out of the VB team, which Mark Anders kind-of implied.
One of the reasons I love blogging is that multiple authors can have a crack at getting the facts right. A great personal example is when I asked the question Who invented the wizard; and a good candidate came forward over a year later. If you see something inaccurate or misleadingly incomplete on this site, please do comment or let me know by email.
I find it hard to take seriously any history about .NET that does not include Java. Indeed, if you go back to .NET 1.0, you can see that the .NET BCL is an exact replica of the Java BCL, with a couple Windows-specific namespaces. A technical comparison with the Java Foundation Classes back from mid 90s should bring mostly matches (I remember that Java Foundation Classes had COM and DirectX namespaces, following Microsoft intention to sabotage Sun’s platform independent BCL.)
Hi Tim, sorry to read this so late, but I want to clarify a point about the origins of the CLR. I never meant to imply that the CLR was developed by the VB team. It wasn’t. Jason was on the team that created the CLR and his account is correct.
What I thought I said, or meant to say was not that the CLR came out of the VB team but thatScott and I first heard about the new runtime from the VB team.
What happened was that after Scott and I showed the prototype that Scott wrote using Visual J++ to teams within Visual Studio, they basically said “wow, we like what you’re doing and if you build it, we will target it.” We then heard from them that for the next version of Visual Basic that they were planning to target this new runtime that was being developed by the team Jason worked on. We liked it, and decided that we would build what became ASP.NET using it.
I would also add that ASP.NET, like the CLR BCL was also originally written in SMC. At the time we started, SMC was what the CLR team was using and was the most stable language for the CLR. Cool came later, but when it did reach stability, we translated the SMC code we had written to COOL and ultimately to C#.
So sorry for any confusion I caused by anything I said or implied!
Mark