The evolution of .NET

Until the arrival of .NET, the Microsoft programming ecosystem had been ruled by a few classic languages, Visual Basic and C++ (with the Microsoft Foundation classes) being typical examples of this.

Note

Also known as MFC, Microsoft Foundation Classes is a library that wraps portions of the Windows API in C++ classes, including functionalities that enable them to use a default application framework. Classes are defined for many of the handle-managed Windows objects and also for predefined windows and common controls. It was introduced in 1992 with Microsoft's C/C++ 7.0 compiler for use with 16-bit versions of Windows as an extremely thin object-oriented C++ wrapper for the Windows API.

However, the big changes proposed by .NET ...

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