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Wow! So .NET turned 20 today!

Five years ago, I wrote this blog post about .NET being my 15-year love affair and I finished the post with this sentence:

Now, I am looking forward to celebrating the 20th anniversary of this love affair.

And well, here we are. Time goes by fast and a lot of things have changed since then.

• I switched jobs,
• our second kid was born,
• and we moved houses twice(!) since then.

Technically, I have been using Windows, MacOS, Linux in multiple flavors (I am writing this blog post on Ubuntu) but .NET has always been a constant in there.

My Favorite .NET Moments

Here are a few special moments that come into my mind when I think of my personal "history" with .NET.

• The first bits - Visual Studio .NET Beta 1 (see the image below).
• I was a PDC 2005, when Anders Hejlsberg personally introduced LINQ and blew our minds 🤯.
• Then there was WPF (Avalon!) which introduced data-binding and MVVM and fundamentally changed our approach of building UIs.
• Then there was Windows Phone with its .NET (Silverlight!) programming model, I was so passionate about for years.
• In 2013, I got .NET (Mono) running on a Raspberry Pi and published an article on windows.developer (then: .NET Magazin) about it.
  • Today, the Raspberry Pi is just another platform where .NET (Core)just runs!
• At Microsoft Build 2014 I head the please watching the open-sourcing of Roslyn by - again - Anders Hejlsberg.
• At Microsoft Build 2018 a friend and I crashed an after conference beer of Beth Messi, Karel Zikumd, Jon Galloway and others in a hotel lobby 😆.
• Solving this year's Advent of Code puzzles making use of all the new .NET 5 and 6 features (top level statements, records, nullable reference types, ...) was a joy!

Of course, I also have my .NET memorabilia from the previous blog post still lying around. Here's a picture of proof. 😊

Now, I am looking forward to celebrating the 25th anniversary of this love affair.