Customizing the Microsoft® .NET Framework Common Language Runtime

Foreword

In October 1999, someone I knew at Microsoft asked me if I would do some consulting work on the Microsoft .NET Framework team. At that time, I knew very little about the .NET Framework, but what I did know impressed me quite a bit, and I immediately joined the team.

At that time, the .NET Framework was internally called COM+ 2.0. But Microsoft knew that this new way of programming deserved a better name than that. Before its first release, the .NET Framework had many other names. One code name was "Lightning." This name was chosen because earlier versions of Microsoft Visual Basic had the code name "Thunder," and "Thunder & Lightning" sounded cool. (By the way, Microsoft’s reference implementation of the Shared Source CLI [http://MSDN.Microsoft.com/net/sscli ...